


Marooned

by honorat



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Deleted Scenes, Desert Island Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-07 22:21:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17969132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorat/pseuds/honorat
Summary: Another fic transferred over from LJ.Disclaimer: The movie belongs to the mouse, the performance to the lovely Johnny and Kiera, the script to Ted and Terry.Summary: I suppose everyone has one of these. Yay! Another island fic. I started writing this because I wanted to see how the deleted scenes would work if they were blended back into the movie--a project that got way out of hand. I tend to write movie novelizations if no one hits me over the head with an oar. As you can see, no one has. There will be more, much more--this is a threat.





	1. An Ocean of Tears

The sense of irony as he arched out over the azure water was almost despair. Ten years and to have come so close! To have had the decks of the Black Pearl under his very feet. To have heard, however muted, the song of the wind in her rigging again. To have felt her grace as she danced through the waves, even wounded as she was. And to have been forced at sword’s point a second time to abandon his lady to the wretch who had stolen and abused her so. The sea parted around Jack Sparrow with barely a splash. Like the Pearl, he was a creature of the sea. As he dove through swirls of tropical fish, jewel-toned, living treasure, the caress of water soothed his heated face. The sting of salt in his eyes was like tears—as if the Pearl sailed away from her true captain on an ocean of his tears. Even as his effects settled gently on the reef, the pirate scooped them up in his bound hands and headed for the shimmering light of the surface.  
  
Treading water, he turned to face the horizon. To face the departure of his dreams, his life, his beloved Pearl. She had come about and was slipping slowly out to sea in the foggy miasma of the curse that hung over her—an immortal ship with an immortal crew, but no longer a winged victory. Instead, her tattered sails hung over her like funeral shrouds, a wraith ship, forever in mourning, forever mourned. For some reason, his eyes still stung and the image of the Black Pearl blurred. But even for a swimmer such as Jack, staying afloat without the use of his hands was work. Reluctantly, he let the buoying salt water carry him away from the Pearl and the horizon, towards that horridly familiar spit of land that he had escaped ten years ago.  
  
He met up with Elizabeth, standing in the breakers, the water foaming white around her knees, as she also watched the Pearl growing smaller. Her face was a study in all too familiar emotions—rage and loss. He knew that she was seeing Will departing in the same way he saw his ship. They stood in silence, braced against the breathing of the waves, unconsciously drawing close to each other, two forlorn specks of humanity alone on the vast sea, as life and love slipped towards the horizon on the wings of tattered black sails.   
  
As they trudged towards shore, Jack turned one last time. When he spoke, his voice was both wistful and angry, “That is the second time I’ve stood here and watched that man sail away with my ship.”

Elizabeth did not respond. For her, the ship was a nightmare, a floating charnel house of horror. And now Will was trapped in that nightmare while she stood helpless on this sandy beach. They watched as the dark ship diminished to a cloudy smudge of black, then faded from sight. The Black Pearl was gone.  
  
Jack, who felt as though his soul had flown like a grey gull out over the sea after his ship, pulled himself together with effort. Shrugging his shoulders and shaking water from his matted hair, he carefully arranged the muscles of his face into his characteristic mad grin and swung around to face Elizabeth, bound hands outthrust. “What do you say, love? Would you be so kind?”

He nearly flinched at the look in her eyes as she rounded on him. If the lass met Barbossa again in his mortal flesh, he thought, the odds might be about even. Nevertheless, although her hands trembled a little, she fought silently with the water-logged knots until the rope loosened and the blood rushed back into his chilled hands in prickling pains. Elizabeth spun around and as much as possible stomped through the water to the shore. Jack followed her, winding up the rope and shaking his head. What a pirate the lass would have made if she hadn’t been born such a lady.   
  
Staggering up the slope from the water’s edge, as usual never quite acquiring his land legs, Jack was conscious of two things—a creeping sense of desolation at finding himself on this hopeless island again and a heartfelt relief that he was not alone. Wait a minute, of course he was sorry Elizabeth had been caught in the net he’d been casting for Barbossa. She did not deserve to die on this barren little piece of earth with his mangy carcass.

Oh, who was he trying to fool? He was desperately glad she was here. And while Gibbs or even the whelp, Will, would have been good company, there was something to be said for dying pickled in rum in the arms of a beautiful woman. He leered admiringly at the girl’s shapely figure outlined by her clinging wet shift. Elizabeth turned and caught the tail end of that look. She started towards him with that highly businesslike manner at the end of which Jack, with the ease of vast experience, read an ear-ringing slap.

Scratch the arms of a beautiful woman. Now how about that rum?

Jack set off on a new tack at a faster pace than perhaps was dignified.

* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth heaved a sigh, gave up on vengeance for the moment, and set out in the opposite direction. Explore the island. That sounded like a good idea. She needed to escape that bloody pirate. How could he find that dismal collection of hull and masts and wretched sails more important than Will’s life? She had thought Jack Sparrow was a heroic figure, had read the stories about him with delight. But he was a monster, not a man. As bad as Barbossa. Human life meant nothing to either of them. If she spent one more moment near him she was afraid she might attack him. Not a good idea, since he was the one who would know how to get off this island and she would need his help. Not to mention the fact that he had a pistol.   
  
She needed to think. Her heart was still numb, stunned by too many emotions too quickly experienced.

Will. Her mind insisted on providing a picture of him, left behind on that accursed ship with those murderous pirates, bound and gagged, snarling and fighting his captors. Will, who was going with those cursed pirates to die in her stead. She could almost taste the bitterness of anguish on her tongue. She needed to plan, but her mind refused to cooperate. Her bare feet left the only tracks on that white empty beach as she tried to escape from the tears that stung her eyes like salt water.  
  
TBC


	2. Black Powder Ritual

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second chapter in my Island Fic with all the deleted scenes. Imagine--I got a whole chapter out of half a deleted scene. How do you spell obsession? This one I could use some help on. I did my best to research the process of cleaning a flintlock muzzleloader pistol. However, I don't know if I've managed to cover it well at all or if I've missed important steps. I don't know a thing about firearms. I just went by my experience rescuing a table saw from being caught out in the rain--take it all apart and dry everything. Any expert help out there would be welcome. Cookies to the ones who catch the allusion to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. That man understood obsession. Anyway, this one is all Jack. Yay!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was edited for technical details thanks to the wonderful kindness and experience of chikkiboo. Any errors remain mine and will be corrected as soon as they are pointed out to me.

Behind the departing Elizabeth, Jack was settling down in the depressingly familiar white sand, stripping off his boots and hanging them on sticks to dry. Might as well pretend there was going to be a use for boots again. Shedding his vest, he added that to the heap of drying things. As soon as he had his effects taken care of, he would get to the rum.

Let Elizabeth explore the island. He could tell her what was on it. In detail. Down to the last bloody palm frond.

He had this island memorized. There was lots of sand. Too much. He bloody hated land. The only thing land was good for was picking up provisions, rum, and pleasurable company. Then it was best to get away from land as quickly as possible, preferably on an ebb tide with a brisk seaward wind. Now here he was stuck on land again. Instead of the smooth undulating wood of a deck, unmoving sand gritted under his feet. And the conch shells. He really should have mentioned the conch shells to Elizabeth. She was going to cut up her feet.

He squinted up the beach at the diminishing figure. Her shift was the colour of sand, and in the waves of heat she was almost invisible. As he watched, the tiny figure gave a startled hop and bent over. Too late. She’d already discovered the conch shells.   
  
He shrugged and turned his attention to his baldric and pistol. One shot. Unbidden, Barbossa’s words echoed in his mind: “Then you can be the gentleman and shoot the lady.” His stomach had turned at the idea even then. One more reason Barbossa was the kind of scum the earth would be well rid of.

This shot was not for the lady. Oh no.

He would, he smirked, be the gentleman and shoot the villain. Well, at least he would be the villain who shot the bigger villain. That was a deed worthy of this tale.

If there was one ray of light in all this shadow it was that with the shedding of Will’s blood, Barbossa would be mortal again. And once he was mortal, he would have an appointment with death. And he, Captain Jack Sparrow, would be of invaluable assistance in making sure Barbossa met that appointment as swiftly as possible. He would get off this island and chase that mutinous bastard around the Cape of Good Hope, around the horn of South America, from Tropic of Cancer to Tropic of Capricorn, from pole to pole, and back again if need be. For a minute his mind teased him with the fear that he would not get off the island. Very well. He would come back from the flames of hell and slay Barbossa. But for now, the weapon must be prepared for its intended victim.   
  
He drew the precious pistol and set about rescuing his shot and powder from their sudden dunking. In the ten years since the mutiny, cleaning this pistol had become a ritual for Jack. It had always to be kept ready to fire that fatal shot. Memories of Barbossa’s crimes against him he generally kept thoroughly clapped in irons in the dark below decks of his mind. There were some things that didn’t bear looking at too often. But at each step of the process of maintaining his weapon, he would haul one memory up, clean it off and polish it. The familiar motions kept the rabid memories just enough at bay. The recital of those memories kept his purpose bright before him like a polar star.   
  
With his sash, already drying in the heat, he rubbed the exterior of the pistol, cradling the slim barrel in the soft cloth, polishing the silver chasing.

He remembered waking in the night to the cold kiss of steel at his throat, the hateful shouts of men he had trusted, the iron taste of blood on his tongue, the even more bitter taste of betrayal, the flame of torches, the burn of rope. He still occasionally woke with the nightmares. That time, he had fought them, at impossible odds. He had been a bloody idiot. Since then, he had learned to avoid fighting wherever possible. Much better to wait for the opportune moment.

Carefully he unscrewed the lock mechanism, drying the hammer, the flint, the frizzen and the mainspring. No rust should interrupt this shot. He aimed the pistol out to sea, towards where the Black Pearl had disappeared. The opportune moment would come. Barbossa would pay.  
  
Next, he dried the pan, and with a wire untwined from his hair, cleared the touch hole. Blowing away a few stray grains of sand, he remembered this island the first time. Remembered being surrounded by water but with nothing to drink. Too beaten and injured to climb a tree for a coconut. Too few coconut palms anyway. Lips cracking with heat and thirst. Trying to find relief in the shade of palms. He remembered the tree by which he had collapsed, dizzy, his head pounding and his muscles cramping, vomiting after trying sea water in desperation. Staring down the muzzle of this pistol, mesmerized by the possibilities. Swearing he would live, and Barbossa would pay.   
  
He pried the patch and shot free. The small round ball rolled out of the end of the barrel into his fingers. Jack dried it on his shirt and held it up to contemplate its symmetry. A sphere. Every line converging on its beginning.

He remembered his last words to his friend and mentor Bootstrap, spoken as he saw the older man seething with anger as his young captain was dragged up onto the deck of the Black Pearl by the mutineers. “Please William, don’t do anything stupid.” But honest Bill had to be a bloody idiot, he did. A wife and kid at home, and he had to antagonize Barbossa. Had to get himself tossed into the sea with a cannon for an anklet. Lot of good that did anyone.

Jack rolled the ball between his thumb and forefinger.

He remembered hearing in a tavern in Tortuga what had become of Bootstrap. He did not remember how he had got out of that tavern that night.

Barbossa would pay.  
  
Pouring the black powder from the barrel, he spread it to dry on his vest. With the rod removed from his pistol, he rammed the fabric of his sash into the bore. Now he had a new set of memories for the ritual. His beloved Pearl, her winged canvas in tatters, her hull uncareened, her figurehead chipping and peeling, the lace of her rigging torn, the gloss of her decks gone to matt. The only part of her Barbossa seemed to care about was the captain’s cabin. Then there was the monkey named Jack; his lip curled at the thought.

He rotated the ramrod gently.

He remembered the fiery death of the bonnie little Interceptor. Jack had held her helm long enough to forgive her for her Royal Navy ancestry. With canvas held high, she had carried them sweetly through that terrible storm. A brave swift ship, deserving of a longer life to sport gaily with the sea.   
  
Taking out the oiled cloth he kept tucked in his baldric, he did his best to oil the bore. The job would need redoing when he had access to grease.

He added to the list of Barbossa’s crimes his return to this godforsaken island. Sand and palm trees and more sand. No fresh water. Barbossa intended this to be death for him and Elizabeth; it might yet be death for them. And finally, Bootstrap’s son. Another bloody idiot just like his father. Barbossa would kill the boy. As always, Jack reassembled his weapon with slow cold fury, replacing the flintlock, reinserting the powder, patch and ball, and pulling the hammer back ever so gently until it notched halfway up. Then he closed the frizzen, covering the pan. The pistol was again ready to fire.

He swore he would live, and Barbossa would pay.   
  
TBC


	3. Welcome to the Caribbean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third installment of my Island Fic plus deleted scenes. This is one of my favorite scenes. I love the interplay between Jack and Elizabeth. Johnny Depp talks about the whole island episode as being one where Jack is completely exposed. I had fun trying to show that while still keeping him Jack. I hope I succeeded. Since I am writing this in third person omniscient point of view, I have switched fairly rapidly between Jack's head and Elizabeth's. I hope that's not too confusing.

Leaving Jack Sparrow to his own devices, Elizabeth found herself circumnavigating the island. At first she had been comforted by the crystal white unspoiled beach lapped with turquoise water, the emerald palms swaying gently in the cool breeze coming off the ocean, the warm caress of sand on her bare feet. However, by the time she was half way around the island, she was becoming tired of sand and palm trees. And she was becoming excessively tired of conch shells. She hadn’t gone barefooted since she was a child, and her feet were bruised and raw from encounters first with the coral reefs and now with the sharp edges of the shells. The pitiless Caribbean sun had already dried her shift into stiff salt-crusted folds and her hair into limp salt-crusted strings and was now engaged in glaring off the white sand, giving her a headache. Her skin felt dusty and dry and hot. Already she was beginning to imagine the taste of cool water. But she was becoming depressingly aware of the fact that there was nothing on this island. Nothing she could see. No water. No food. How had Jack Sparrow survived here last time? How had he escaped?   
  
Much sooner than she had expected, Elizabeth saw the figure of the pirate still sitting on the beach where she had left him. She didn’t want to converse with him, but she didn’t see any alternative. Slowly, picking her way gingerly through the sand, she approached him. A chill, at odds with the heat of the day, went through her as she recognized what he was doing. He was reloading his pistol, a concentrated introspective look on his face. She remembered Barbossa’s words, drifting out over the water as he drove Jack off the plank: “You can be the gentleman and shoot the lady and starve to death yourself.” Whatever resources Jack Sparrow knew about on this island would be strained two-fold by her presence. His chances of survival would be cut in half. And she already knew how ruthless this man could be.   
  
Elizabeth paused. Her first impulse was to escape; her second, based on the utter impossibility of the first, was to keep walking. She came up to where the pirate captain was sitting in the sand, his possessions spread about him drying. The expanse of sand stretched out in front of her, empty except for her own footprints. Sparrow looked up at her and followed the direction of her gaze.

“It’s really not all that big, is it?” he remarked, turning back to the pistol.   
  
The silence hovered oppressively. Elizabeth stared at Jack Sparrow, who was looking perfectly unconcerned with either their plight or her presence. Suddenly, she just wanted it all over. “If you’re going to shoot me, please do so without delay.”   
  
Jack squinted up at the girl, thoroughly nonplussed. Of all the things he had never imagined she would say, that was the winner. He draped his forearms over his knees, dangling the pistol. Tilting his head to one side, he asked, “Is there a problem between us, Miss Swann?”  
  
A problem? Elizabeth couldn’t begin to list the problems she had with this unprincipled, treacherous, murderous pirate. She took a step towards him. “You were going to tell Barbossa about Will in exchange for a ship,” she accused, her eyes hot with hate.  
  
Ah. So that was it. Jack leaned forward. He nodded at the empty ocean surrounding them. “We could use a ship,” he pointed out.

Her stormy look did not lighten.

“As a matter of fact,” he continued, emphasizing his points with his pistol, his tone acerbic. “I was going to _not_ tell Barbossa about bloody Will in exchange for a ship because as long as he didn’t know about bloody Will, I had something to bargain with, which now no one has, thanks to bloody, stupid Will.” He scrambled to his feet.  
  
Her eyes dropped. “Oh.”  
  
“Oh!” Jack imitated her mockingly. He stuffed the pistol into his sash.  
  
“He still risked his life to save ours,” Elizabeth insisted.  
  
“Hah!” Jack gave a sharp crack of unamused laughter, his eyes wide in disbelief. Lot of good that did, missy. The whelp had risked his life so that they could starve to death in the near future, that’s what. Bit of a miscalculation there.

He stalked off up the beach. If he was going to be having to converse with young and despairing love, he needed rum.   
  
Elizabeth watched miserably as Jack Sparrow made for the stand of palm trees behind them, each step looking as though he wasn’t finding the land quite where he thought he’d put it. How could she make that heartless pirate care? For Will’s sake she had to try. Doggedly, she pursued his retreating back, calling after him desperately, “So—we have to do something to rescue him!”  
  
Jack whirled around to face her and flapped his arms in her face. “Off you go then!” he encouraged with enthusiasm, shooing her away with the backs of his hands. “Let me know how that turns out.” He smirked insincerely. With an unwieldy pivot, he resumed his former course.

Elizabeth did not, however, go “off.” Instead she ran along behind him. Why had he ever thought that a beautiful woman was a charming addition to a desert island? He must have been mad. She was a right nuisance, that’s what. He increased his speed. Rum. Rum. Where’s the rum? Bloody palm trees all looked exactly alike. It’d been ten bloody years.  
  
Elizabeth followed Captain Sparrow into the sun-dappled shade of the palm grove. The debris on the ground kept tripping her already abused feet, but she ignored the pain. Sparrow didn’t even seem to notice what he trod upon or stumbled over. The pirate was regarding each tree they passed as if it were a suspicious Navy officer, staring at it ferociously. She couldn’t imagine what he was up to. What she wanted him to be up to was plotting a way to get off this wretched island.

“But you were marooned on this island before, weren’t you?” she persisted. “So we can escape in the same way you did then.”  
  
She held her ground as Jack rounded on her.

“To what point and purpose, young missy?” His voice was harsh, his eyes angry. “The Black Pearl is gone.” He stabbed a hand towards the empty sea. “And unless you have a rudder and a lot of sails hidden in that bodice,” Jack glanced insultingly down at the item in question, measuring her in the air with his hands, “ – unlikely –” he judged, “young Mr. Turner will be dead long before you can reach him.”  
  
Dead.

Jack saw Elizabeth flinch at the word. There was no point in mincing any words. She might as well resign herself to the bitter truth as soon as possible. He knew—who better—what kind of mercy Bootstrap Bill’s son would receive from Barbossa’s men. God, he needed rum.   
  
Ah ha! There it was. The tree he was looking for. Surely that was the one. He knocked on the trunk trying to ignore Elizabeth. If he had hoped to make her angry enough to leave him alone, he was going to have to rethink his strategy. The lass was as persistent as a tick on a dog.   
  
“But you’re Captain Jack Sparrow,” she reminded him from the other side of the tree. As though he didn’t know.  
  
Yes! He was Captain Jack Sparrow, who always knew where to find rum. This was the palm tree! Ah! Buried treasure of the best sort.   
  
“You vanished from under the eyes of seven agents of the East India Company,” Elizabeth persisted.   
  
Sparrow began to pace off the magic distance in the correct direction, swinging his legs high in the air, windmilling his arms to keep his balance. Elizabeth stared at him incredulously. She was stuck on an island with an utter lunatic!   
  
Four large paces later, Jack bounced experimentally on an unremarkable patch of sand and sea grass. The sand bounced back. Now that was how land ought to behave.   
  
“You sacked Nassau Port without even firing a shot!” A note of panic accompanied Elizabeth’s recitation of his former escapades. What if this were not the Jack Sparrow of the stories? He only thought he was a pirate when in actuality he’d escaped from Bedlam.   
  
Jack was flattered that Elizabeth had heard the stories. After all he’d worked hard at embellishing most of them himself. However, there was a slight problem.   
  
Elizabeth planted herself firmly in front of Jack. “Are you the pirate I’ve read about or not?”   
  
That would be the problem. Jack found himself trapped. Will’s bonnie lass stood before him believing he held some clever solution to their plight. They were abandoned to die on this island, but the last time he’d been here, he hadn’t died. Now she demanded the truth from him.  
  
“How did you escape last time?” Her voice was soft, intense.  
  
How did he escape last time? Jack looked at Elizabeth, all passion and fury and indomitable will. Determined to fly to the rescue of her beloved in the face of the laws of the universe. Incapable of imagining a future in which everything was lost. Had he ever been that young? She expected him to be a storybook hero. To somehow hold the key that would unlock the last minute save of the day that preceded her happy ending.

Captain Jack Sparrow.

Who could not even succeed as the hero in his own tale. Who knew down to the bitter dregs of his soul that eventually everything was lost. Who spent his life merely a step ahead of defeat, playing the luck, dodging the raindrops. He played a good game. But every game had its finish.  
  
Elizabeth watched, puzzled, as, for the first time since she had met him, Captain Sparrow went completely still, his mobile face frozen in unfamiliar seriousness. His eyes lost their mad glitter, becoming fathomless as the sea and as empty. He took her by the arms, pushing her back a few steps; then he dropped his hands. One hand rose again as if in protest then stopped, hanging there helplessly. The garrulous pirate seemed to be hunting for words. When words came they were empty of bombast, bare of satire, cold with honesty. This was not Captain Jack Sparrow. Not the charmer of sea-life. Not the honorary chieftain. This was only Jack, stripped of the legend, pinned against the wall of inescapable truth.   
  
“Last time . . .” he spoke as though the words were being dragged from him by grapnels. “ . . . I was here a grand total of three days, all right?” He pursed his lips together—the truth a sour taste in his mouth. Breaking eye contact with her, he turned to the sandy expanse beside them, bent down and dug about for what proved to be a latch.  
  
“Last time,” he threw open a cellar door, revealing a yawning square hole, “the rumrunners who used this island as a cache came by,” he tramped down rickety wooden stairs drifted over with years of sand, “and I was able to barter a passage off.” His voice echoed up hollowly from the dark pit into which he had disappeared. Elizabeth heard clinking and clanking as he rummaged about down below. “From the looks of things, they’ve long been out of business. Probably,” a hand appeared clutching a tall glass bottle filled with caramel colored liquid, “have your bloody friend Norrington to thank for that.” The hand was followed by the rest of the pirate as he clambered out of the cellar with a second bottle of rum, squat, round and black. He let the door drop.   
  
Jack saw the hope leaching out of Elizabeth’s eyes.

Her voice was thick with contempt, near to tears. “So that’s it then? That’s the secret grand adventure of the infamous Jack Sparrow?” Her eyes accused him. “You spent three days lying on a beach, drinking rum!”  
  
Actually, he hadn’t found the cache the first day. Nor the second. He had found the trapdoor by accident, pitching in heatstruck delirium onto the unnaturally springy turf. At the time he had been more grateful that the rum was liquid he could drink than that it could make him drunk. But he did not tell Elizabeth this. Jack stood silently looking down at the girl, watching the illusion peel and flake away revealing the sham, watching the ideal shrivel up and die. That’s right, love. In the real world miracles don’t happen. In the real world, you can’t believe in anyone. A man needs a lot of rum to drown out the real world. Jack needed to get started drowning it out immediately.   
  
The pirate pasted on his most annoying grin. Spreading his arms out, he waved the rum bottles about cheerily and gave a little island dance sashay. “Welcome to the Caribbean, love.”

The glare Elizabeth gave him could have melted steel.

The smile wiped off his face as swiftly as it had been painted on. Rudely, he pushed her aside and headed, rum in hand, back the way he had come.  
  
TBC


	4. No Truth at All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fourth in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes.

Elizabeth watched the pirate roll off towards the beach, already looking drunk although he hadn’t even opened a bottle yet. She fought back angry tears and set out after the annoying man. Somehow, she had to convince him to help her do something to help Will. Even if they could not get off this island the way he had before, Captain Jack Sparrow was synonymous with fantastic escapes. All of the stories couldn’t be false. He was certainly adept at escaping her. For a man who looked like he couldn’t quite remember how to walk, Jack made amazing speed. Elizabeth had to run to get ahead of him. She didn’t manage to cut him off until she was standing in the tide-washed sand with foaming curls of salt water tugging at her hem.   
  
Almost desperately, she asked. “So is there any truth to the other stories?”

* * * * *  
  
Jack halted, looking bleakly at Elizabeth. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft with irony. “Truth?” he asked.   
  
So the bonnie lass was still looking for a pirate from the romances, was she? Treasure and triumph. Daring escapades costing nothing. Well, now was not the time for pretty fictions. If it was truth the lass wanted, then she should have it. Slowly he drew up his right sleeve revealing the pirate brand of the East India Trading Company, seared indelibly into his forearm. The sizzle, the stench of red hot iron meeting shivering flesh still haunted his nightmares occasionally. He would never completely escape the East India Company.   
  
Wordlessly he pulled up his left sleeve. Elizabeth shrank back, her face crumpled in shock. The underside of his arm was a tracery of old scars, branching like angry lightning over his skin. That is the record of real blood and real pain, my lady. That is where the truth lies.   
  
Elizabeth looked on, horrified, as Jack dragged aside the neck of his shirt to show two powder-burnt scars high on his chest. Either shot could have killed him. Almost had in fact. If it hadn’t been for old William Turner. He shied away from thoughts of Bill. Bill who had paid the final price. Those crimson pages of legend were dyed in blood. Someone always paid the price. And the price of gold was most often paid in blood. Sometimes a man paid it himself. Sometimes another paid it. Often the price was too high. But no one escaped the devil’s bargain. And now young William was on his way to pay the price for the treasure he had coveted. And now his lady fair hoped that she was in a story where there was no real cost.  
  
So, Miss Elizabeth Swann, pampered child of luxury whose gold has been paid for so far away from you that you do not even know its cost nor who paid, is there any truth in the lovely stories of old Captain Jack? Any truth that can give you any hope?

His voice was bitter as he answered her question. “No truth at all.”   
  
He let the silence drag out. Then he folded himself down in the sand, brushed his tangled hair back from his face, and looked past Elizabeth out to sea. He didn’t want to see the hopelessness in her eyes, didn’t want her to see the same look in his own.  
  
When he spoke again, changing the topic, he gave her the brightest picture he could muster, but his voice was dull, lacking conviction. “We can stay about a month, maybe more. Keep a weather eye open for passing ships and our chances are fair.”

Then, at last, he was able to uncork the bottle he was holding and gulp down a blessedly numbing swig of rum.   
  
Elizabeth stared silently at all that was left of one of her childhood heroes. An ordinary man on a beach drinking rum in order to forget. A man whom death had obviously stalked for a long time. Who seemed already in debt to Fate for his life. He had denied the truth of the stories, but his scars told of a different, far darker truth. A truth as bitter as death.   
  
She wondered if he really believed what he had just told her. Could a person survive for a month on rum? And even if they could, that meant no one would be left to rescue Will. Although she no longer believed Jack Sparrow would be able to help her, she had to ask one last time, “And what about Will? We have to do something.”  
  
Jack heard the despair in her voice. There was only one thing to do in a hopeless situation. Raising a finger, he pointed at her agreeably. “You’re absolutely right.”

He recorked the bottle and rolled it down the beach in a gentle arc to where it rocked lazily in the water at Elizabeth’s feet. She watched it, her eyes empty.

Unstoppering his second bottle, Jack held it up towards the path of the Pearl’s departure. “Here’s luck to you, Will Turner,” he saluted. He took a deep pull of rum. Young William would need all the luck they could wish him where he was going.   
  
TBC


	5. A Perilous Truce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fifth in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes. The end of the deleted scenes. From here on be dragons. The movie with these scenes does not explain when Elizabeth gets the idea to burn the rum. So, you’ll be getting my version. If you want to skip the part of this fic where Jack and Elizabeth run about in my imagination with no movie help to keep them in line, go straight to the chapter called Playing with Fire (it’s not up yet, but it will be). Or come along for a rather extensive ride. Jack and Elizabeth on an Island. The possibilities are endlessly amusing. Let me know what you think of my addition to this scene.

Staring down at the tall glass bottle bobbing in the shallow waves, Elizabeth wondered if Jack Sparrow was right—if there was nothing she could do for Will. She leaned down and picked up the bottle, contemplating its cloudy, sloshing liquid. The sun relentlessly drummed on her shoulders. Salty, unpotable water swirled around her ankles. Thirst desiccated her tongue.

Elizabeth gave up.

Will was doomed to die on Isla de Muerta as a sacrifice for a shipfull of cursed pirates; she was doomed to die in a drunken stupor on a desert island with a vile and insane pirate. She might as well get started.   
  
Elizabeth uncorked the bottle. Trudging over to Sparrow, she slumped to the ground beside him. This then was the grand pirate adventure she had always dreamed of. Staring at the bottle, she sighed. Well the song got this part right anyway.

“Drink up me hearties, yo ho!” she whispered, raising the bottle for her first taste of rum. The fiery liquid bit at her throat and assaulted the inside of her head like an explosion. She grimaced, her eyes watering.   
  
Jack suddenly frowned and turned to her. “What was that, Elizabeth?”  
  
“It’s Miss Swann,” Elizabeth insisted irritably, scowling at her bottle.   
  
Jack raised his eyebrows, held up his hand in a warding gesture and turned away. Best just leave the girl alone while she sorted out whatever was eating her. He ran his hand over his moustache and raised his bottle. He had some drinking to catch up on.  
  
Elizabeth wondered what she really did want. She hadn’t been able to get Will to call her Elizabeth and she couldn’t get Jack Sparrow to stop it. What did her name mean to her? She only knew that alone on this island with this strange dangerous pirate, she felt out of control as she had never felt before. And the rules that had chafed her in her safe home, she clung to now as if they would prevent anything terrible from happening. But Captain Sparrow was acting as though she had insulted him, rejected some overture of friendship she hadn’t been aware he’d made. With effort, she tried to relax. Just have a conversation with this man. After all she’d be stuck here with him for a long time. A panicked voice in the back of her mind gibbered that it might be forever.   
  
Taking a deep breath, she answered his question. “It’s nothing. Just a song I learnt as a child when I actually thought it would be exciting to meet a pirate.” She didn’t quite succeed at keeping the bitterness out of her voice.  
  
Jack, ignoring the implied insult, looked interested. “Let’s hear it.” Something to pass the time while he got drunk enough not to think too hard sounded good. Besides he liked singing. Couldn’t do it, of course. His crews usually threatened to mutiny if . . . best not go there.   
  
Elizabeth was not feeling cooperative. They were marooned. Will was gone. And this bloody pirate wanted her to sing a children’s game song? “No.”  
  
“Come on, we’ve got the time,” Jack snapped impatiently. “Let’s have it.”   
  
His scowl reminded Elizabeth that this man was perhaps not the safest one to antagonize, but she was not in the mood to be intimidated. “ No!” Her response was even more emphatic.   
  
Obviously something was going on with Miss Swann. Jack kept watching her silently. The girl stared unhappily at the bottle of rum in her hands. Finally she sighed, “I’d have to have a lot more to drink.”  
  
Jack contemplated the ramifications of a drunken Elizabeth. He eyed the way her slim fingers played with the neck of the bottle. The corner of his mouth quirked a little. He raised his own bottle towards her, his seductive tone no longer implying a desire to learn a children’s song. “How much more?”   
  
Elizabeth frowned uneasily at his disturbing grin. Jack tilted his bottle and drank deeply. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, Elizabeth edged a little farther away from the pirate. Her bottle of rum seemed a safer subject to focus on than Jack Sparrow. She supposed the heavy glass object might be useful as a weapon.  
  
Jack followed her speculative gaze. “I’d suggest you break the bottom off on a tree,” he offered.   
  
“What?” She looked up, startled.  
  
“If you’re looking to make a weapon,” he explained helpfully, “a broken bottle is a far more serious threat.” He pantomimed bashing someone with a bottle, then took another swig of rum.   
  
Elizabeth stared at him in disbelief.   
  
“That is if you’re planning on defending your somewhat problematic virtue from my dastardly advances.” Jack frowned thoughtfully, setting one finger on his chin and looking sideways at her. “Though what the point of that would be, I’m not sure.”  
  
“I don’t know what you mean,” Elizabeth spoke defensively.  
  
“Oh, I think you do, love,” Jack smirked.   
  
“Don’t call me love,” she snapped. “It’s Miss Swann.”  
  
“Well, Miss Swann,” he complied amiably, “you’ve been a guest on the Black Pearl for over a week. Do you really think any of those high-toned and fancy inhabitants of Port Royal, not to mention any of the seedier ones, is going to believe those poor bastards were incapable of taking advantage of that little situation?” He leered at her.  
  
Elizabeth reflected that Sparrow was right; she really didn’t have a reputation any more. She had known of women who had been ruined for being caught in far less damning circumstances. And what that had to do with anything when it looked like she might never return to Port Royal was another question. What’s more, she very much doubted that Jack Sparrow was in the category of being incapable of taking advantage.  
  
Jack watched the thoughts flicker across the girl’s face with amusement. “Y’know, lass, life’s a lot more fun if you’ve really done the things they hang you for.”  
  
“Perhaps I really should break this bottle,” she said reflectively, raising it.  
  
“Don’t waste the rum, love,” was Sparrow’s only comment. “You can break it after it’s empty. But as long as you still want to use it, you won’t be needing to.” And he returned to systematically emptying his own bottle.  
  
Elizabeth stared at him wonderingly. “I hardly expect chivalry from a pirate,” she said archly.  
  
Jack looked up. “You’re the one who’s read all the stories, Miss Swann. I very much doubt any of them mentions that ravishing unwilling virgins is one of the pastimes of the infamous Captain Jack Sparrow.”  
  
“No,” she glanced censoriously at the pirate, “but a number of ravishable virgins seem to throw themselves at him.”  
  
“Ah, well,” he looked pleased, “that’s another matter, isn’t it?” Nodding at her bottle, he suggested, “Have some more rum, love.”  
  
So. The line was drawn here. He would seduce her if he could, but he wouldn’t force her. She wondered why that did not entirely comfort her. Looking at the rum in her hand, the only drinkable liquid on the island, she imagined that Jack Sparrow’s definition of willing consent did not include her being of sound mind. Since his own mind seemed manifestly unsound half the time, he probably didn’t consider it a flaw.

How much rum could the pirate’s principles survive? How much could her own?  
  
TBC


	6. Crab Racing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sixth in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes. The deleted scenes are done. From here on be dragons. This just appeared when I was thinking that something must have happened to get Jack and Elizabeth on friendly enough terms to be singing around a bonfire. This one is Elizabeth’s POV.

There weren’t many options for amusement on this island paradise that was resembling hell more every moment. Elizabeth simply wanted to lie collapsed in the shade during the heat of the day. For the first time she was mildly grateful to Barbossa for making it impossible for her to remain modestly sweltering in that heavy dark dress. Her shift was more than enough in the relentless sun. She could feel her exposed skin burning whenever she ventured out of the shadows. But Jack Sparrow seemed incapable of sitting still for long anywhere, and his sun-bronzed hide was impervious to the worst the sun could do.   
  
At first she was content—no, make that thrilled—when he would wander off, toting his rum bottle, on some incomprehensible foray down the beach or through the trees. She wanted him to leave her alone. However, she soon found herself listening for him, spooked by the silence of this prison island broken only by the forsaken cry of the occasional seabird. Her thoughts were not good company. Fear nipped at the edges of her mind; her imagination kept parading images of Will’s fate, of her own fate, each time growing more disturbing. She discovered she had no taste for being alone. Worse, she suspected she was drinking more rum than she ought.   
  
And so the next time the pirate hove into view, Elizabeth found herself trailing out to meet him. Sunburn, sunstroke, Sparrow’s company—all were preferable to loneliness. Jack seemed pleased that she had joined him. She wondered for an instant whether he also was escaping the demons his mind could conjure up. He did not seem to have any definite destination for his ramblings. Sometimes they would circle the island looking out to the sea which remained depressingly bare of longed-for sails.   
  
“How likely are we to be able to hail a passing ship?” Elizabeth asked pensively.  
  
Jack eyed her. “Are you wanting the truth or a comfortable lie?”  
  
“The truth, of course,” she sighed. “Although, I suppose that’s given me an answer of sorts.”  
  
“The truth it is, then,” he agreed. “I’m sure I can manage it, unfamiliar as I am with such a commodity.” He pointed all his fingers not involved in hanging on to the rum at the sea. “We’re not near any major shipping lanes—or any minor ones for that matter.” He glanced over at her. “Means a merchant vessel or indeed a pirate would be unusual. So that leaves the odd smuggler or a military patrol. Since something seems to have driven the rumrunners off, our most likely chance would be the British Navy, seeing as how this island is nearest to British territory.”   
  
Looking down at the rum he was holding, Jack Sparrow hesitated. Then he flashed Elizabeth a wry grimace. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, when I say that I’m not particularly eager to see the Royal Navy out there. The end results for me of being permanently stranded on this island and of being rescued by your bloody friend Norrington are remarkably similar.”  
  
Elizabeth wondered what it must be like to know that one had a bounty on one’s head—to prefer starvation to rescue.   
  
“So is there any hope?” she asked.  
  
“There’s always hope, love.”  
  
Other times they waded out towards the reefs, watching the colourful fish dart away from their legs. Jack showed Elizabeth how to stand in the wet, tidal sand, letting the hissing foam rush past her feet and then slide silkily back to sea each time burying her feet a little further. The sand sucked at their legs, resisting when they tried to leave.   
  
“The sea’s like that, love,” the pirate told her. “Spend enough time beside her, she’ll draw you in.”  
  
Elizabeth thought she might be getting drunk. Her bottle of rum was only half full now, and although Jack Sparrow had certainly had a few swallows, the majority of the missing rum appeared to have made it inside her head where it was swishing around. She was not quite sure just how that had happened.   
  
Captain Sparrow was already three quarters of the way down his second bottle without a noticeable change in his behavior. Well, she supposed his curses were becoming more inventive when he came across treacherous conch shells with his bare toes. And possibly stone cold sober he would not have captured two shilling-sized rock crabs, drawn two lines in the sand a pace apart, and insisted that they hold a race. He’d even named the disgusting little creatures—Pintel and Ragetti—he’d said.   
  
“Which one do you want, love?”  
  
She curled up her lip and exclaimed emphatically, “Neither!”  
  
“Come on,” he disapproved. “Musn’t be squeamish. Pick one!”  
  
That last had been a command, and the pirate was looking mulish and dangerous again.  
  
Reluctantly, she pointed at one of the small crabs. Might as well humour him. There were worse things a drunken pirate could be trying to force her to do. “That one, then.” They both looked exactly alike to her.   
  
“Ah! Ragetti!” Jack handed her the crab, and she shivered as she took it between thumb and forefinger. The tiny legs waved about seeking purchase with little prickling touches on her skin. She almost dropped the thing.   
  
Crouching like two children, Jack and Elizabeth lined up their crabs. Elizabeth rolled her eyes, unable to believe she was actually doing this, but Jack seemed entirely absorbed and entertained. On the count of three (Jack did the counting of course), they let the animals loose. Both crabs scuttled forward, but then Ragetti got disoriented and headed back to the start line. No matter how much Elizabeth headed him off, he seemed determined to go the wrong direction. Jack was laughing like a boy, odiously triumphant, as Pintel scurried toward the finish line. However, soon the crab veered off course, refusing to cross the line.   
  
“Hah!” Elizabeth smirked.  
  
Jack retrieved the wanderer and they tried the race again with similar results.   
  
“Nevertheless,” he claimed, “Pintel got closer to the finish than Ragetti, so I win.”  
  
“Do you always have to win?” she complained.  
  
“Of course, love,” Jack grinned madly. “I’m Captain Jack Sparrow, savvy?”   
  
“Even if you have to cheat?”  
  
“Pirate!”   
  
As if that explained everything. Probably it did. Annoyed, Elizabeth changed the subject. “How do you know this one’s Ragetti?” She was not going to touch it again.  
  
Jack picked the crab up and held it entirely too close to her face. It waved its small pincers menacingly, and she backed up.

“He’s had a run in with something,” Jack pointed out. “Missing an eye.”

It was true. The little monster glared at her with a single eye stalk.   
  
“It’s defective!” she pointed out peevishly. “You can’t have a fair race with a defective crab.”  
  
“You had your pick.” Jack sounded smug.   
  
Then he noticed that Pintel was getting away, making rapid little crab hieroglyphs on his way to the sea. Dropping Ragetti, Jack lurched off in pursuit of the escapee. Elizabeth thought she had never seen anything quite so funny as the pirate scrambling through the sand, drunkenly trying to grab the tiny creature. Of course the rum might be clouding her judgment. She laughed so hard she had to sit down in the sand.   
  
Mission accomplished, Jack returned with prisoner in hand. On the way back, he scooped up the less energetic Ragetti, who had also been heading seaward. Reaching Elizabeth, he looked down at the still giggling girl. A strange look crossed his face.   
  
“You should try that more often, love.”  
  
She squinted up at him, puzzled. “Try what?”  
  
“Laughing. Rum. Both, if that’s what it takes.” Before she could dodge, he chucked her under her chin like her father might have done. “It suits you.”  
  
Thinking back, Elizabeth really couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed and played, free and unfettered by convention and expectation. It had certainly been before her hair had gone up and her skirts down and her father had started preaching propriety and the inadvisability of consorting with blacksmith’s apprentices.   
  
Uncomfortable under Jack’s scrutiny, she pointed at the creatures he was still absent-mindedly holding. “What are you going to do with them?”  
  
Jack looked at the two crabs in confusion, as though he couldn’t quite remember why he’d bothered to chase them down. “I don’t suppose they’re much worth eating,” he mused, curling his lip.   
  
Elizabeth came back to the present with a jolt. They were marooned, not taking a day at the beach. Would it come to that? Would she be so hungry those disgusting creatures would look like food?  
  
Jack grimaced. “Don’t think I’m that hungry yet.”   
  
Elizabeth was relieved. She could imagine him trying to force her to eat them. “Why don’t you put them back where you got them,” she suggested hurriedly.  
  
This appeared to be a good suggestion, because the pirate wandered off toward the shore, holding a one-sided conversation with the crabs. “Back to the sea, mates. I guess you’ll be wanting to be free.”  
  
TBC


	7. Survival is the Only Option

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which heavy questions are asked, piracy takes place, and a good time is had by all. Elizabeth the Pirate coming up. She surprised me in this one. Usually no one makes me laugh more than Jack. Seventh in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes. The deleted scenes are done. Here be dragons. I may never get off this island.
> 
> This one is dedicated to Captain Tish at ff.net whose persistent insistence that I update sent me chasing after Jack and Elizabeth who had been hiding out doing who knows what in the back of my brain. Sufficient rum having been used as a bribe, lo and behold, here they are. I am not responsible for the ridiculous things these characters choose to do in their spare time on the island. Do not ask me where Jack picked up the Sanskrit name for coconut--he travels a lot.

Jack Sparrow had alighted back on the beach by the water’s edge. Apparently, he was finished flitting about for the time being. Elizabeth dropped down on the depressing hot white sand again and wished they were still walking. Here in the stillness, with only the murmur of the waves for background, her thoughts caught back up with her.   
  
She rolled a fold of her shift between her fingers, feeling the crisp salt dried into the fabric, the small irritating grit of sand. Before long, she would be entirely covered in sand, she feared. It had already begun drifting over her. If only she could just go to sleep. If only Jack had shot her when she’d asked him to. If only Will had never taught her to swim, and she could have leapt off the plank of the Black Pearl and drowned in the warm embrace of turquoise waters. Fragile rainbows of coral would have crept over her bones. Jewel-like fish would have darted about her resting place. Blessed oblivion. And she would not be sitting here helpless. Elizabeth hated, above all things, feeling helpless.   
  
Her stomach was tying itself in knots, not only with hunger. In another minute, she might jump out of her skin or run screaming up and down the beach or burst into hysterical sobbing. Almost she wished she had some embroidery to do. And she despised embroidery. Anything rather than sit here quietly waiting for Will to die. Waiting to starve to death herself. Perhaps this was what going mad felt like. She should ask Jack; he would certainly know.  
  
She needed to do something! And Jack had told her there was nothing she could do. Elizabeth twisted the linen fiercely, imagining it was Barbossa’s neck.  
  
Of course, Jack was looking perfectly unconcerned. He was, she noticed in disbelief, building a sand castle. Just how old was the man?   
  
  


Jack eyed Elizabeth sideways. Unless he was very much mistaken, there was a lass well on her way to fretting herself to flinders. He’d tried that before himself. It didn’t much help. Which was why he was ignoring the very real and very ugly situation they were in by keeping his hands and his thoughts busy elsewhere.   
  
“Hey, love,” he suggested. “Why don’t you give me a hand here?”   
  
A little playing in the sand would take her mind off whatever was driving her crazy, and the company would help him do the same.

  
  
Elizabeth noted the pirate’s surprisingly hopeful expression. Well, it would be something to do, she decided. Scooting over to the heap of sand Jack was sculpting, she began adding handfuls of damp sand to the walls.

  
  
The two of them worked in silence for some time while the building took shape. Jack was actually startled when Elizabeth spoke up.  
  
“Jack?”   
  
“Yes?” He glanced at the girl’s face. She was frowning. Not good. He braced himself for whatever was developing behind that expression. At least answering her questions was something to do.  
  
“How long does it take . . .” Elizabeth looked down at her grimy hands, “to die of thirst?” She bit her lip.  
  
Jack’s hands froze where they lay on the sand. That had been so quiet he’d almost not heard it. No easy questions for Miss Swann, it would seem. No wonder she’d been acting so tense. His emotional weather sense predicted storm clouds and heavy seas ahead.  
  
“Haven’t tried it yet, love,” he answered lightly, continuing to square off the walls.   
  
“I’m serious Jack,” she persisted. “I . . . need to know. How long can you live without water?”  
  
Jack sighed and gave in to the inevitable. So far he’d had no success at all in heading off Miss Swann’s questions. “About a week—or so I’ve been told. The heat will make a difference, I imagine.” He’d rather not imagine, actually. He took a large swallow of rum.  
  
“And without food?” Elizabeth began digging out a gateway, not looking at Jack—as though the question didn’t matter.  
  
“A month, give or take. But we’re likely to find enough food in the sea to drag it out a good bit more.”   
  
Jack brushed the unruly hair back from his face, leaving little spangles of sand in it, and stared out at the ocean. Then his hands returned to moving in slow circles over the castle walls.  
  
“So, when the rum runs out?” Elizabeth smoothed out the gateway.  
  
He didn’t answer that question. Life would be over then in every sense of the word.   
  
“A ship may turn up,” he remarked optimistically.  
  
“But if one doesn’t?”  
  
The pirate began patiently crenellating the walls of their castle. “We might be in trouble if one doesn’t,” he finally answered. “The rum may hold us that month, but to be honest with you, rum isn’t the best thing for staving off dehydration. It’s better than nothing, but we could use some fresh water.”

  
  
“We won’t be getting any.” Elizabeth was surprised at how dispassionate she felt—as if speaking her fears aloud somehow diffused them.   
  
She tried to build an arch for a bell tower on the front wall, but the sand refused to cooperate. After her second try and massive collapse, Jack handed her some palm leaves.  
  
“Try these,” he offered. Glancing at the sky, he returned to the issue of fresh water. “It might rain.”  
  
Elizabeth looked at him skeptically, the palm fronds curving into an arch in her hands.  
  
“Alright, so it isn’t the season for it. A month it is, love,” Jack admitted, meeting her eyes for the first time in this conversation.  
  
“A month it is,” Elizabeth squared her shoulders. Somewhere on this island, she knew, death had begun its stalk. She wondered whether they would mark the passage of the days or just count time in heartbeats.   
  
The bell tower was complete. She allowed herself a moment of self-congratulation.  
  
It was, in a way, comforting to be stuck here with a man who wasn’t trying to coddle her or impress her. Who didn’t hesitate to tell her the bitterest truth. Who expected her to comport herself in adversity with a dignity and fortitude that matched his own.   
  
Elizabeth looked down at the sand castle they were constructing. Her mouth quirked. Well, scratch the dignity part.

  
  
Jack noticed the small smile. Good. The lass was back on an even keel.  
  
As a final touch, Elizabeth added a flag made from a palm frond and a twig. She sat back on her heels to admire their work. Quite a respectable sand castle.   
  
Finishing the crenellations, Jack dusted off his hands. Time to lighten up this fit of the dismals.

“This,” he explained to Elizabeth, “is Fort Charles.”

  
  
Realizing that it was indeed familiar, Elizabeth looked more closely at the structure. She was surprised at how accurate Jack had made it. Apparently he’d paid close attention during his brief sojourn there.   
  
“And this,” Jack gestured to an odd shaped lump of sand with three twigs sticking out of it, “is the Black Pearl, who is about to sack the fort. You,” he gestured to Elizabeth, “can be the British. And I,” he pointed to himself, “will be the pirates.”  
  
“But I want to be a pirate,” Elizabeth complained.   
  
Jack looked at her as though she had said something entirely different. “By all means, love,” he agreed, widening his eyes. “Anyone who wants to be a pirate should be able to be one.” He stood up, shaking sand out of his clothes with a look of loathing.   
  
“Up, up! Step lively lass,” he urged Elizabeth, waving his arms in circles, motioning for her to rise. “Let’s make this official.”   
  
Confused, Elizabeth scrambled to her feet. Jack planted himself in front of her in a sloppy version of parade attention.  
  
“Miss Swann.” Captain Sparrow snapped, switching from his light banter to his command voice.  
  
Unsure where this was going or what she was supposed to be doing, Elizabeth straightened a little herself and ventured, “Aye sir?”  
  
That seemed to be the right answer since the captain continued to bark in her face, “Do you have the courage and fortitude to follow orders and stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death?”  
  
“Aye, sir.” Her voice grew more confident, as she remembered faintly how she used to play at being a pirate.  
  
“Good man—er—woman,” Jack approved. “Welcome aboard the Black Pearl!”   
  
She’d heard that somewhere before. But looking into Jack’s eyes, sparkling now with enthusiasm and camaraderie, she wondered how she could have ever compared him to Barbossa.   
  
“Now, hold out your hand,” the pirate instructed. Eying him skeptically, remembering the crabs, his new crew did as she was bid. Jack poured a collection of small shells into her open palm. “Ammunition,” he explained.

  
  
Once again, Elizabeth found herself crouching in the sand playing games with the irrepressible legendary Captain Jack Sparrow. There was nothing at all about this in any of the stories. If they got away from this island alive, she would have to start another story. But not before Jack was a long way away. Singapore perhaps.  
  
“We’ve succeeded in sneaking up on the fort,” Jack informed her. “Black sails at night, you know. Our job is to blast the bejeezus out of them with our little cannon.” He demonstrated how to flick the seashell cannon balls at the fort with his fingers.  
  
“Fire!” he shouted.   
  
Elizabeth jumped. That was not an order meant to be heard from point blank range. Nevertheless, she obeyed, loading her cannon and firing a shell at the sand fort.  
  
“Got ‘em!” she cried, surprising herself.

  
  
“That’s my bonnie lass!” The captain laughed as a hole appeared in the wall. His own shot blew out several crenellations.   
  
Pausing for a moment, he contemplated his newest crew. The girl bent over the little ship, tangled hair blowing in eyes that lit with battle eagerness. Her teeth were bared in a fierce snarl as she rained shell-fire down on the walls of the little fort. He knew intellectually that this was the daughter of the Governor of Jamaica. That she had been brought up sewing samplers and playing the harpsichord and sipping tea and dancing in measured figures. That by rights, she should be more at home in a ballroom wearing the likes of that heavy dress he’d stripped off her in the bay of Port Royal. But he couldn’t connect that imaginary picture with the lass who’d defended him on the docks, who’d faced up to him when he’d held her hostage, who’d stood defiantly waiting for Barbossa to slit her throat and then had refused to answer his questions, who’d belted the pirate whose sword arm Jack had seized with the stock of her rifle and then attempted to deck Jack himself. He shook his head and resumed firing at the fort. What a pirate the lass would make. It seemed a pity she’d never really get the chance.

  
  
The Pearl’s fusillade continued for several minutes until the pirates ran low on shot. The walls of the fort were riddled with shells and in danger of collapse. A significant number of shells had also missed the fort entirely. Elizabeth felt some of her tension uncoil as she wreaked destruction on that pitiful pile of sand. She hadn’t known how much pent up violence she had been longing to release.  
  
“Ha!” chortled Jack. “I got the gaol! All the languishing pirates have escaped. We’ll take ‘em aboard as extra crew.”  
  
Elizabeth blasted the parapet over which she had fallen back at the beginning of this terrible adventure. “Strike your colours, ye bloomin’ cockroaches,” she crowed as the palm flag fell over.  
  
“The fort has surrendered. All hands to the boats!” Jack ordered.  
  
“Aye, Captain,” agreed the crew.  
  
The captain and crew of the Black Pearl landed on the beach of Port Royal and took stock.

  
  
“So, Miss Swann, now Pirate. Who shall we rob first?” the captain queried.  
  
“How about the governor’s mansion?” Elizabeth the Pirate laughed. “I know where they keep all the silver. And we can kidnap the governor’s daughter and hold her for ransom.”   
  
“And then?” Jack prompted, highly amused.

  
  
“Mrs. Fitzbrace-Pennythump,” Elizabeth grinned in satisfaction. That old biddy had never failed to run to her father with tales of his wild-to-a-fault daughter.  
  
“You’re havin’ an old pirate on, lass,” Jack exclaimed incredulously, shaking his finger at her.  
  
“I swear that’s her name.” Elizabeth crossed her hands over her heart. “She has the most hideous ruby necklace, which she always will wear with puce.”  
  
Jack shuddered theatrically. “Well then it will be an act of charity to relieve her of it, won’t it lass?”   
  
“She will scream. And all her chins will wobble,” Elizabeth giggled.

  
  
“I vow, the very thought enchants me,” Jack swooned, pressing the back of one wrist to his forehead. “Lead me to this plump beauty with the delightful rubies. Where next?’  
  
Tilting up her little nose and assuming a haughty expression, Elizabeth simpered, “Miss Eslington, of course. She’s been insufferable ever since she got engaged to a Viscount back in England.” She batted her eyes at him.  
  
“Is he a particular prize?” Jack asked, eying the lass wonderingly. Amazing what a bit of rum would do for a woman.  
  
“How should I know? I haven’t seen him. Neither has she for that matter. But he did send her the most amazing pearls as a betrothal gift. She has never stopped talking about them or him since.”  
  
“Ah ha!” the captain gloated. “I knew there was a reason I should love the lass, beyond her perfect manners. Will she scream? How many chins has she?”  
  
“She will likely bite,” Elizabeth informed him repressively. “Quite fatal, I believe. And no chins at all.”  
  
“None?” Jack rubbed his decorated chin.  
  
“None whatsoever. She is chinless.” Elizabeth tried to tuck her own pert chin into her neck with no success. “But very small eyes,” she continued enthusiastically. “Really, any chin at all would quite have overpowered her eyes.”  
  
“You terrify me. I think I shall leave her to you,” Jack decided with a dismissive wave of his hand.  
  
“Well, you shall also leave Lady Emmeline Stanhope to me,” Elizabeth smirked and crossed her arms.  
  
“Why’s that love?” he asked suspiciously.  
  
“She really is a diamond of the first water. And rich. And, so rumour has it, a bit wild.” Jack’s unloyal crew glared censoriously at him. “She would like you too much, and you would like her too much. So she’s mine. You can rob the Justice of the Peace.”  
  
Jack pouted. “You never let me have any fun.”  
  
“Oh,” said Elizabeth airily. “He’s quite pretty and rich, too.”  
  
Jack hit her with a palm frond. “For that you deserve to be flogged.”  
  
“Now, for the important question,” he continued, choosing to ignore the fact that ship’s discipline had totally broken down and his crew was laughing herself sick. “Where’s the best place to get rum?”  
  
“How should I know?” Elizabeth managed. “I don’t drink rum. Didn’t. Whatever.”  
  
“Don’t drink rum?” The captain was horrified. “You can’t be a pirate if you don’t drink rum. It’s practically the first of the articles. Don’t give me a turn like that. Now there’s a good lass,” he wheedled. “Where’s the rum?”

  
  
Elizabeth gave an exaggerated sigh and pointed to the bottle he was holding. “The only rum to be had is at the Sparrow’s Hand. All the rum you can drink, any time, day or night.”  
  
“Well now,” said Jack taking a swig, “That’s more like it.”   
  
He glanced down as his stomach gave a conspicuous grumble.   
  
“Speaking of not starving to death in the near future, it appears it’s time for a bite to eat,” Jack commented, getting awkwardly back on his feet.

Elizabeth had instant visions of little disgusting crabs. Her stomach was clenched with what she knew could only be mild hunger, a foretaste of the future. But crabs did not yet appeal. However, the pirate did not head towards the ocean. Instead, he picked up the rope with which Barbossa had bound him and wandered off towards the center of the island. Apparently the sack of Port Royal was over. Curious, Elizabeth scrambled to her feet, feeling a little light-headed, and followed him. Her walk was beginning to resemble Sparrow’s.   
  
She discovered Jack standing at the base of a tall palm, looking up.   
  
“Best do this before I have much more rum, love,” he informed her matter-of-factly. “’S not a job for a man three sheets to the wind.”   
  
Anyone else would have been several sheets beyond that with the amount of rum Jack had in him, Elizabeth reflected.   
  
Wrapping the rope around the trunk, Jack shinnied up the tree, as agile as a monkey. “There’s only a few of these on the island,” his voice drifted down. “If we’re in luck, some of them will have nuts on them. Ah ha!”   
  
Elizabeth had to tilt her head back to see him at all.   
  
“Move out of the way, love,” the pirate called. “I’d like to not oblige Barbossa by killing the lady.”   
  
Rapidly, Elizabeth got out of range. From where she now stood, she could no longer make out what Jack was saying, but it sounded profane. Apparently, the coconuts were not cooperating.   
  
Finally, the first of the large green shells thumped to the ground below the tree. More curses encouraged a second nut to part from its moorings. Three more nuts were followed by the pirate sliding down the trunk.   
  
“Well, that’s all for this one.” He scrubbed his hands on his trousers and coiled the rope over his shoulder. “There y’are, lass.” He indicated that her job was to carry the nuts. “Got a couple more trees to try. Better than last time I was here. These’ve gotten old enough to bear fruit. Takes six to ten years, y’know.”  
  
By the time Jack had harvested the final tree he could find, they possessed 18 coconuts. Elizabeth could scarcely see over the stack in her arms. Jack carried the rope and the remainder of the nuts as they returned to the part of beach she was coming to think of as home. With relief, she dumped her burden on the ground.  
  
“One month,” said Jack, lining up their inventory. “That means we get one of these every one and a half days.”  
  
Well, that settled the question of how they would mark time—by vanishing coconuts.  
  
The pirate selected one of their prizes and drew his sword. Expertly he slashed off a conical wedge of the fibrous husk, leaving a thin layer covering the interior. Elizabeth’s ears caught the sound, sweeter than the peal of church bells, of liquid sloshing inside the large green nut. Liquid that was not rum. When Jack inserted the blade into the shell, the clear fluid spurted into the sparkling sunlight. She had never seen anything so beautiful.  
  
“There you are, love,” Jack handed her the shell. “Kalpa vriksha—the tree of life.”   
  
Grasping the awkward object in both hands, Elizabeth tilted the opening to her lips letting the wonderfully sweet coconut milk slip down her throat. Life indeed. For the first time since they had washed up on this island, she felt her thirst being quenched.

  
  
“Whoa there darling,” Jack remonstrated. “Don’t get greedy. Save a little for Ol’ Jack, here.” He wasn’t really worried. A coconut like that would contain as much liquid as a bottle of rum. The girl wasn’t going to be able to down that immediately.  
  
Nevertheless, Elizabeth looked abashed and passed the shell back to him.

Jack drank deeply. Really, he hated coconut milk. Rum was much better. But the liquid was necessary, so he endured it.   
  
When they had alleviated their thirst, they poured the remainder of the milk into an empty rum bottle that Jack then stored in the cellar. It would not be as good the next day, but good had ceased to be a requirement for their diet.  
  
The precious liquid having been preserved, Jack used his sword to split the shell, revealing the gelatinous, half-formed "meat" lining its walls. Slicing a sliver from the husk, he offered it to Elizabeth for use as a scoop to scrape the filling out. Then he cut himself another sliver. The two castaways sat side by side, digging into the green coconut with the relish of the truly hungry.

 

Elizabeth, licking the coconut meat off her makeshift spoon, could not imagine why she had ever disliked the slimy stuff. It was pure ambrosia.

  
  
Jack surveyed their line-up of round green treasure triumphantly. “We’re going to survive, Elizabeth,” he spoke confidently, “for more than a month. It’s the only option.” His hand caressed the butt of the pistol in his sash and his eyes grew cold. “I have a debt to collect on.”  
  
TBC


	8. Not Like the Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just when Elizabeth and Jack are starting to get along I mess things up again. Tension increases. Words don’t convey the truth. Philosophy happens. I’m beginning to sense a theme here: The real Jack Sparrow vs. the Legend. Elizabeth has figured out that he is a human being rather than a hero, and that he hasn’t forgotten how to play. In this chapter she is reminded that in spite of all his admirable qualities, the man is still a pirate, which is rarely a noble occupation. Not a romance pirate in sight here. Sorry, Miss Swann. Jack tells some stories most of which deserve their own fics.
> 
> Thanks and a chest of uncursed Aztec gold go to geekmama for beta work on this. Any errors and inconsistencies remain mine.
> 
> I’ve received some major inspiration from cupiscent’s story Beads. Check it out for truly beautiful writing. My version is an allusion to hers.
> 
> I'm also using Johnny Depp's statement that all of the stuff in Jack's hair represents important memories. I've called these mementos *souvenirs* using the French meaning of the word rather than the English.

As their shadows began to lengthen and the white-hot glare of the sun shifted to gold, Jack developed an obsession with building a bonfire. He conscripted Elizabeth to hunt for driftwood along the shore—she was suspicious he had conch shells in mind when he divided up the labour—while he rifled the cache for old barrels and bits of planking.  
  
“Does it get cold at night?” Elizabeth asked. She was eager for some relief from the heat.  
  
Jack glanced around as though for some hidden enemy. “Not the cold, love,” he said conspiratorially. “The dark.”  
  
Elizabeth was puzzled.  
  
Patiently, Jack explained. “Been here before. Too bloody dark the first night you’re marooned. Can see the future in the dark.”  
  
She stared at him curiously, wondering what he meant.  
  
By the time the sun had swollen to a huge red disk resting on the curve of the horizon, edging the purple wisps of clouds with crimson and gold, they had amassed a significant pile of burnable objects. Jack then selected enough of them to make what Elizabeth thought would be an exorbitantly oversized fire.  
  
Her question of how Jack planned to light that fire was answered swiftly when he removed the flint from his pistol and set alight the dried palm fronds he was using for tinder with several sparks struck on the blade of his sword. Elizabeth felt a little foolish that she hadn’t thought of that. The pirate grinned at her as the flames licked up the dry wood. Settling down by the fire, he carefully set about reassembling the flintlock.  
  
This seemed to Elizabeth like a good time to escape the pirate and take care of matters of a highly personal nature for which she needed to get far out of sight—not an easy accomplishment on their tiny island. But the over-consumption of rum was making it an urgent necessity. “I’m going for a walk,” she informed Jack. “By myself,” she added, before he could offer to join her. “You stay right here, and don’t you dare follow me.”  
  
Jack raised an enlightened eyebrow. “Of course, love. Enjoy your—walk.” As she set out for a distant and private location, she heard his voice drift after her. “Don’t get lost.”  
  
Elizabeth snorted in a highly un-ladylike manner.  
  
Returning to their camp, she paused in the gathering twilight and watched Captain Sparrow curiously. The last long rays of sunset gilded a path across the restless sea, brushing his dark face with light and incongruously haloing his disheveled head. The pirate sat by the fire, elbows on knees, one hand clutching his third bottle of rum, the other absently toying with a strand of beads glinting in his hair. Or perhaps it wasn’t so absently. His actions almost seemed deliberate, agile fingers caressing a single trinket with the intensity of a priest saying his rosary, then moving on to the next one. Occasionally he would raise his bottle in a toast then take a swallow of rum.  
  
She picked her way cautiously down to the beach, wondering why he put all those odd things in his hair. Somehow they seemed more than just a terrible sense of fashion. Jack did not look up as she joined him sitting in the sand.  
  
Dangerously pot-valiant, Elizabeth lifted her bottle along with Jack and took a small sip. “What are they for?” she asked, reaching out to touch the elaborate silver ornament resting on his shoulder.  
  
He seemed to come back from a distance. Turning to her, he raised an eyebrow. “Getting a mite personal aren’t we, love?”  
  
Elizabeth considered this carefully. “I think I’ve had too much rum.”  
  
His grin flashed gold in the dying light. “Have you now?”  
  
She felt the brush of fingertips on her hair. Uneasily, she moved away. “I think you’ve had too much rum.”  
  
His kohl-smudged eyes were darker than a midnight sea, watching her. “’T ain’t possible, love.” But he withdrew his hand.  
  
Relieved, Elizabeth returned to the object of her quest. “But why do you tie things in your hair?”  
  
Sparrow remained silent for a moment, gazing out to sea. Finally he spoke. “Memories, love. The French call them souvenirs.”  
  
Elizabeth was fascinated in spite of herself. This dirty, drunken, intriguing pirate had stories in his hair! “Tell me,” she begged, like a small child.  
  
Frowning, he warned, “You don’t want to be hearing these stories, missy.”  
  
“But I do,” she insisted recklessly.  
  
“They’re not like the stories in the books.”

  
  
No. The objects woven into his hair were relics of truth.

  
  
Elizabeth remembered the terrible scars. “I didn’t imagine they would be.”  
  
He did not answer her at first. When he spoke, his voice was husky, velvet over steel.  
  
“What profit is there for me in telling you anything, Miss Swann?”  
  
Having received a fair impression of the coin by which the Captain would like to be paid, Elizabeth resigned herself to continuing mystery. She had nothing else to offer him and she was not offering him that. Then she remembered. He had already asked her something she had refused.  
  
“The song,” she said.  
  
“Hmm?” He raised a curious eyebrow at her.  
  
“The song about pirates. If you tell me the stories, I’ll teach you the song.”  
  
Jack Sparrow laughed. “My compliments, Miss Swann. I never would have thought of that.” He eyed her speculatively. “Fair enough. The stories for the song. We have an accord.”  
  
He held out his hand. It took Elizabeth a moment to realize what he wanted, then, gingerly, she held out her hand and shook his.  
  
“Well, now, lass,” Jack looked at her oddly. “Which stories would you be wanting to hear first?”  
  
Elizabeth scrutinized the pirate’s ratted and knotted hair. “Those ones,” she pointed at his forehead where a string of beads dangled.  
  
His eyes sparkled wickedly.

 

The bonnie lass would be fun to shock. “These?” he laughed. “These are mementos from the lovely ladies, and some not so lovely, I’ve . . .”

  
  
“Stop!” Elizabeth interrupted frantically. “I don’t want to hear about it, them, whatever!” There were far too many beads on that strand. Had he really . . .? No! She did not want to know. Did she?  
  
Jack was silent for a moment. “They weren’t prostitutes, darling. Not business transactions.” He smirked at her. “Wouldn’t have had enough hair.” Growing pensive again, he stroked the glittering strand. “These ones meant something—if only for a night.”  
  
Elizabeth shuddered. She did not want to listen to this man’s sexual escapades, whatever they had meant to him. The stories had been off-colour enough that she’d hid them from her father. It would be indecent to hear the truth about what should be private.  
  
Besides, Jack’s thoughts tended to tack off in that direction far too easily anyway. Particularly, she did not want him reminded that he’d like to add a bead to that strand for her. Or even worse, she supposed, not add one.  
  
The mischief returned to Jack’s eyes. “This one,” he indicated a round metal bead, “is the shot they had to dig out of my . . . well, never mind that. Jealous husband,” he explained, unabashed.  
  
“Mr. Sparrow!” Elizabeth protested.  
  
“’S Captain, love. Or just Jack,” he reminded her. “I warned you, Miss Swann. I said you didn’t want to hear these stories.”  
  
Elizabeth wondered if she should just leave well enough alone. But her curiosity overruled her prudence again. After all, the most objectionable were over, weren’t they?  
  
“What are these for?” she pointed to the colourful strand near his right temple.

  
  
Well, that was probably a better choice for a maiden’s ears, Jack reflected. “Ships I’ve captained,” he answered. The girl waited for him to continue.  
  
He couldn’t see these beads, but he knew the shape of them under his touch as well as he remembered the feel of the helms of the vessels they memorialized. He had sailed as crew on many ships, but these few had given themselves to him. Had trusted him to lead them through sledge-hammering seas into safe harbours. Had gentled their fretting under his hands and had slipped through the dolphin-dancing waves in answer to the breath of his wish. Had fought with their last strength for him.  
  
He spoke their names now, a familiar litany, as his hand drifted over the souvenirs.  
  
“The Segreta, the first little brig I commandeered after I got off this island. She was badly captained, and most of her crew came over to me.” Now that had taken some quick talking and even quicker thinking. And two goats and twenty-five chickens. Gibbs had been of the opinion that Jack was utterly mad even to attempt it. He smiled at the memory.  
  
“She went down in a pitched battle with a French privateer Revanche who had an eye on the swag in our hold. So of course the Revanche was my next ship.” He continued, moving from the small gold bead to a larger red one. “She was a bit of a slug-a-bed, but she was armed to the teeth. I handed her over to my first mate when we took the brig, the Margaret Anne. I needed speed more than firepower.”  
  
Jack lingered a moment over the black and white memento of the Margaret Anne. “She was a bonny ship, but no match for the hurricane that sank her right in harbour.” He had not been with her at the time, a fact that still rankled. No storm had ever bested Captain Jack Sparrow. His absence had doomed his ship.

  
  
He stopped when he came to a chunky white bead. Elizabeth noted the way Jack’s mouth twisted, as though he were remembering something that left a bad taste.  
  
“Go on,” she encouraged.  
  
The pirate scowled at her. “This is for the Jolly Mon, Anamaria’s boat,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I sank it.”  
  
“You sank Anamaria’s boat?” Elizabeth choked.  
  
“Well, not entirely,” Jack hedged. “The crowsnest is still above water. Was. The last time I saw it. I left it at the dock in Port Royal. Probably owe a fortune in shillings by now. Anamaria was not amused.” He shrugged apologetically.  
  
“I can imagine.” Remembering that fierce dark woman, Elizabeth wondered how Jack had dared.

  
  
Jack changed the subject. “And this last is for the Interceptor.” He stopped abruptly, remembering the moment he had seen her die. Elizabeth would know that story as well as he.

  
  
There was one glaring omission.  
  
“What about the Black Pearl?” Elizabeth asked.  
  
Jack’s expression darkened. “I had one for her once. Just another thing Barbossa took when he took my ship.”

  
  
She had been his first ship. Jack had vowed she would also be his last. He did not need a physical object now to remember his dark lady by. He was himself, body and soul, her remembrance.

  
  
One look at his face convinced Elizabeth that the better part of valour would be to refrain from pressing Jack on that story.  
  
“What about the loose ones,” she asked. “You know, the ones just scattered about randomly.” She waved at his disordered locks.

  
  
Jack shook himself away from the memory of Barbossa’s laugh as he cut the single black pearl pendent from his bound captain’s hair. “Ye won’t be needin’ this where ye’re goin’ now, Jack.” Get out of my head, you bloody bastard! He uncurled his hands which had somehow formed fists.  
  
Another question. What had it been? Oh yes. The solitary souvenirs.  
  
“Absent friends,” he answered, raising the rum bottle in a salute. Had he really had enough rum to tell Elizabeth any of these stories? “Which ones catch your fancy, love?”

Elizabeth scrutinized the pirate’s collection of mementos. “That one,” she decided, pointing to an age-blackened shilling at the end of one lock.  
  
The lass was a marksman with more than just a rifle, Jack noted. He picked up the item in question, feeling the worn smooth surface. This was indeed a ghost from the past.  
  
“This one,” he began, then stopped while the memories swirled in his head. Memories of cold and hunger and desperation. Of shaking a stubby paw as grubby as his own and knowing he had found a friend. Of the first faint stirring of hope as they stood in the Deptford shipyards and saw the tall masts rising from the docks beyond. “Edward St. John,” he spoke the name aloud for the first time in over twenty years.  
  
“Who was he?” Elizabeth prodded.  
  
“A friend.” Such a simple word. Another he had seldom used in twenty years. “We ran away to sea together. Signed on to a merchantman bound for Singapore and Zanzibar. I was cabin boy and Edward, being a bit older, was an able-bodied seaman.”  
  
“What happened to him?” Elizabeth prompted when Jack didn’t go on.  
  
Jack reflected that he deserved to have to tell this story. “A merchant captain is pretty much lord of his own vessel. His only constraints are his own conscience and what little pressure a man with connections might bring to bear on him—which does not happen very often. Captain Shelton was a vicious fool. Abused all his men. Drove everyone like dogs. When Edward stabbed the second mate in self defense—and you really don’t want to hear that story Miss Swann—Shelton ordered him a man’s flogging.”  
  
Elizabeth shuddered both at the picture her imagination conjured and at the tone in Jack’s voice.  
  
“Now Edward was a bigger lad than me, but he was sickly-like. Probably, now I think on it, consumptive. He never quite recovered from those 36 lashes of the cat o’nine.”

The whole crew had been mustered on deck to witness. The sound of those cords ripping flesh off his friend’s back, the screams, still deafened Jack when he remembered.  
  
“I believe I was stupid enough to attack the captain over that, and I can attest to the efficacy of that particular brand of discipline. Avoided it like the plague ever since,” he added. He had scars to remember this incident by as well as the worn souvenir. He could still hear Edward’s racking coughs and then his cries as the motions tore at his back in the swaying hammock at night. It had been a mercy when the lad had slipped away from them a week later. Taking another sip of rum, Jack raised a salute: Fair winds and following seas, mate.  
  
When the avenging fury, the Black Pearl had taken their ship the very day Edward’s body had been dropped into the sea, Jack had shot his captain himself, an irony which did not escape him. Hadn’t killed him, but not for lack of trying. The action had caught the pirates’ attention, and he’d begged to join their crew. And his first step onto his dark lady had been like the clarion call of destiny.  
  
He noticed the lass was looking a bit green around the gills. Well, she had asked for these stories. Did he have any that didn’t reek of tragedy?  
  
“How old were you when that happened?” Elizabeth asked softly.  
  
“Near as I can remember, about fourteen,” he answered.  
  
“What happened to your family?”  
  
“Now, love,” Jack protested. “I’ve not had nearly enough rum to be telling you those stories.” There wasn’t enough rum, as far as he was concerned. Time to distract that pesky girl before she started asking questions he started answering.  
  
“This one, now this one is a very good story.” Jack hurried on as he tugged at another coin. “This is for Father Bradford. He and I had a little competition once to see who would die first—him of old age or me of a shot to the chest.” He gestured towards where she knew the scars were hidden. “He won.”  
  
Elizabeth looked on expectantly as he let the pause drag out. “You can’t just leave it like that!” she coaxed  
  
Ah ha! He had her on a new tack now. He’d make this a long one.  
  
“It all started when the British Navy frigate Relentless, part of a task force on the prowl for the rival French, thought she’d take herself a pirate ship. We were under each other’s broadsides when I got picked off by a Navy sharpshooter in her rigging. As pretty a shot as you could ever hope to see.” The pirate looked reminiscent. “Could’ve used a man like that on the Pearl. Too bad the Navy had its claws in him. Wouldn’t sign the articles at all.”  
  
“You mean you captured a Navy ship?  
  
“Of course, love. Wouldn’t let a little thing like a slug of lead in my chest stop Captain Jack Sparrow, eh? Course it was Bootstrap, Will’s father y’know, had to finish the battle. I wasn’t much use to anybody after that. But we took out her mast and holed her hull but good. Bit of a waste actually. Barely had time to transfer the provisions and ammunition before she was going down. We sent the crew off in their little longboats, and Ol’ Bootstrap set course for the nearest inhabited island in search of medical help. Their surgeon said he’d see us in hell before he helped a pirate.  
  
“By the time he found Father Bradford at the little mission on the island, we were both pretty much convinced I’d received my notice to quit. The priest was half as old as Methusaleh, but he was a learned man, and between him and Bootstrap and a medical manual, they managed to dig that shot out and leave me with a fighting chance.”  
  
Looking up at her, eyes bright with remembered challenge, Jack grinned. “I always take fighting chances, love.”  
  
He continued with the story. “Now Bootstrap had to get back to the Pearl and lead the inevitable Navy search in the wrong direction, so he left me with the good Padre and high-tailed it up towards Hispaniola.”  
  
Jack was enthusiastically acting out his story with his hands. “By the time he shook the Navy off the Pearl’s tail and made it back, I’d begun to recuperate, Father Bradford had shuffled off this mortal coil, and I was left with his job.”  
  
“What?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “You didn’t . . .”  
  
“I most certainly did,” Jack smirked, steepling his hands in a saintly fashion. “Confessions, mass, a wedding, two funerals, a christening, and last rites. One of me better gigs.” His eyes glinted. “Wedding gifts, heirlooms, access to all the houses in town—even the governor’s--and did I mention the poor box?”  
  
“Jack,” Elizabeth was scandalized. “You robbed all those people disguised as a priest?”  
  
“Yep!” the pirate looked pleased with himself. “Well,” he admitted, as though confessing a failure, “maybe not the poor box. And I guess the governor losing his job was mostly my fault—he was a worse pirate than me. So I wasn’t an unmitigated scoundrel.”  
  
“No,” Elizabeth shook her head exasperatedly, “just a thorough-going one.”  
  
“Of course, love.”  
  
Mission accomplished. Elizabeth had lost that dangerously sympathetic look and was back on her original story quest.  
  
“What about those,” she indicated the longest strand of beads ending in the elaborate silver ornament.  
  
He ought to have known she’d sail right off the shoals and onto the rocks. He needed Gibbs around to remind him that reaching an accord with a woman was bad luck. That had better be one amazing song.  
  
"Ah! These ones.”  
  


Elizabeth watched as Jack Sparrow’s face sobered.

  
  
“These are the heavy ones, lass. You’ll not be liking these.” He wondered why he was even considering letting the girl talk him into this, song or no song.  
  
She waited for him to continue. He looked enquiringly at her. “Still game?”  
  
Elizabeth nodded.  
  
“’S your call, love.” But he remained silent for a long time staring at the fire. Finally, he sighed. Waving a graceful hand at the dully gleaming strand, he explained, “These are for the dead.”  
  
Elizabeth frowned at him uneasily. “What do you mean?”  
  
“This one,” one finger brushed an age darkened wooden bead, “is for the first man I ever killed.” His eyes looked back into the past, seeming no longer to see her. “It was the first boarding action my captain had sent me on. He was a young merchant sailor. More courage than skill. He got between me and my way out.”

  
  
Jack was silent for a while. Elizabeth watched him, a twisted feeling in her stomach.

  
  
“That one was unnecessary. I could have disarmed him, but I was a young pirate. More skill than sense. I’d been given some bad advice.”  
  
Deliberately, Jack recalled the man’s freckled face, the way his sandy hair had curled, wet with sweat on his forehead, the surprising force it had taken to drive a cutlass into a living body, the way the light had slowly faded out of blue eyes that did not leave his own dark ones, forever linking them on this threshold between life and death. So easy to take life; so impossible to give it back. The remainder of his scramble back to his ship was an indistinct blur until he found himself, arms slicked with the sailor’s blood, leaning over the rail, vomiting. He raised the bottle now and drank to the memory. Sorry, mate.  
  
“These,” he ran his index finger and thumb along three shells. “My own crew, love. On my last visit to this godforsaken island, I . . . did not come peaceably . . . as it were. By the time they took me down, three of them had missed their chance to try out immortality.”  
  
In the blindness of rage and night, he had not known whom he fought. His only goal had been Barbossa’s smirking face. He’d wiped that smile off, too. That filthy bastard still wore that scar below his eye. But Laroche, Carlos and Adam had been in his path. Burly, powerful Laroche. Short-tempered and even shorter-thinking. Ex-French Navy. Nigh impossible to rein in. A fey, violent streak. A hard drinker and a harder fighter. A member of his crew for more than six years. Dark, shy Carlos. A maniac with the sword and a good pirate. A good man at your back in a fight but a bad one in a mutiny. Nineteen year old Adam. Picked the wrong role model, even if it had been the winning side. Only the previous season, Jack had taken his turn sitting up all night with the lad, refusing to let him die of a gut shot. And in the end his blade had taken that life. Jack didn’t remember killing any of them. He’d only seen them dumped unceremoniously over the edge of the Pearl. Barbossa had not paid any note to them; their former captain would never forget them.  
  
His hand drifted down. “This one,” he cupped the silver ornament with its dangling links, “this one is for the first woman I ever killed, Elizabeth.”  
  
He did not see her shrink away from him.  
  
“The sack of Baracoa it was. Silversmith’s shop. The mistress of the house pulled a pistol on me. In the ensuing struggle, she fell and broke her neck.” Jack’s voice was monotone.

  
  
Elizabeth felt sick. She buried her face in her arms, not looking at the pirate. Captain Sparrow didn’t seem to remember she was there.

  
  
He called up the memory of the Cuban woman as a man might draw a knife through his own flesh. A stout plain woman, black hair escaping its tight knot in loose tendrils, her head at an unnatural angle. The child that had appeared in the inner doorway, screaming for its mother. He had fled the shop. Among the things he had taken had been this ornament. In high winds or hard fighting, it beat against his face like vengeance. That night he had known he had to become captain—to have the freedom of the sea and the right to choose his own battles. When he had sacked Nassau Port without firing a single shot, it had been in this woman’s unknown name.  
  
Jack’s hand moved to a rectangular silver bead. “This one,” he began. But looking up, he noticed that Elizabeth had clapped her hands over her ears. Apparently the lass had heard enough stories. One corner of his mouth quirked wryly. She’d been right. Maybe he had had too much rum. Otherwise surely he’d never have unearthed those particular stories to tell such an audience. The dratted girl seemed to draw the truth out of him like poison, in spite of his worst intentions.

  
  
Elizabeth huddled on the sand, her arms wrapped around her legs, shivering in spite of the heat of the fire. The growing darkness beyond the firelight seemed suddenly more menacing, while she was trapped in a circle of light with a man who had killed people. Who kept tokens of his murders in his hair. She had let that deceptive playful side of him fool her into almost trusting him. He was watching her now, those dark dangerous eyes knowing too much, seeing too much. He was smiling. Somehow that horrified her the most. As though he enjoyed shocking her, making her afraid.  
  
“Why?” she hissed.  
  
“Why what, love?” he asked.

“Don’t call me love,” she snapped. “Why do you keep trophies of the people you kill?”

  
  
“Not trophies, love,” he explained patiently. “Souvenirs—you would say for remembrance. You ask why?” Jack paused looking out into the encroaching night as though he were seeing something she could not. “To the living, I don’t owe anything. But to the dead I owe the truth.” He turned back to her, still touching the souvenirs where too many stories remained unspoken. “Only an animal kills and does not remember, Elizabeth. I wear these,” he lifted the strand of beads, “because I choose not to be an animal.”  
  
He glanced at her pale face not unkindly, “You need some more rum, love.”  
  
This time Elizabeth took the bottle he handed her eagerly and gulped rum with something approaching his own enthusiasm. But she still refused to look at him.  
  
He frowned at her, “I’m a pirate, Elizabeth. It’s not a pretty occupation at times. What did you imagine it was like? Swash, swash. Buckle, buckle. All the swords with dulled edges so no one gets hurt?”  
  
“You kill people for profit,” Elizabeth accused.  
  
“Actually,” Jack corrected her, smoothing his moustache thoughtfully, “I try not to kill people for profit because that makes it less likely they’ll be trying to kill me.”  
  
“But you kill them anyway.”  
  
“I have killed men, and yes, even women, before now, Elizabeth.” He enumerated the reasons on his fingers. “I’ve killed people who were trying to kill me, people who were trying to kill or harm others I chose to protect, people whom your bloody friend Norrington would have been happy to hang had he got his hands on them. I’ve also given orders in battle that led to the deaths of men. And I’ve killed a few people unintentionally. I’m not proud of all those deaths, although some of them I would do again, given the chance. Now explain to me how this makes me different from any other naval captain such as, say, Norrington?” Jack waved in the direction of Port Royal. “Now, if that man wore souvenirs, he’d need a wig like your father’s.”

  
  
“Commodore Norrington does not kill people for his own profit,” Elizabeth insisted.  
  
“Oh!” said Jack, acting enlightened. “So as long as dear King George profits, it does not matter how many Spanish and French sailors see Davy Jones’ locker, eh?”  
  
“That’s only when we’re at war,” Elizabeth insisted, feeling that the argument was rapidly getting away from her.  
  
“So when I fire across the bows of a Spanish merchantman and board when she heaves to or accept her surrender after a brief skirmish, plunder her holds, and leave her to her crew and passengers with enough supplies to make the nearest port, I am being an irredeemable pirate who should hang as high as Haman on the Fort Charles’ gallows, but if I had instead accepted letters of marque from Ol’ Georgie, and had blown them to smithereens, taken captives, plundered their ship and scuttled her, and paid me dues to the crown, all would be forgiven? I’m afraid the moral subtleties escape me, Miss Swann.”  
  
“But you capture British ships, too.”  
  
“So?” Jack asked, widening his eyes. “What’s that got to do with anything? My home is the sea, love. The same water flows everywhere, around the whole world.” His gesture covered the entire horizon. “What have I to do with the squabbles of those land-based pirates called nations? Their ships are only out here now because they are engaged in plundering the lands they’ve stolen from their original inhabitants.” He tipped his head and looked thoughtful, then marked his idea with an index finger. “Except for the ones that are actually plundering the original inhabitants themselves. The slave ships, that is.”  
  
Elizabeth remained silent.  
  
Jack shrugged. “Disapprove of what I do as much as you want, Miss Swann. But be consistent, please. At least I know what I steal and from whom I take it, and I risk my own life to do it.”

  
  
For a long time, neither of them said anything more. Jack removed the pistol from his sash, weighing it in his palms, turning it so the silver scrollwork glittered with the flames. He noticed Elizabeth’s eyes fixed on his movements.  
  
“For all I’m such a bloody murderer, Miss Swann,” he remarked. “I haven’t fired this,” he held up the pistol for her inspection, “in ten years.”

  
  
The shot, Will had told her, Jack Sparrow was saving for Barbossa.  
  
Elizabeth thought about what Jack had said, thought about causing the death of another human being. She herself had plunged a knife into Barbossa’s chest. Had he not been immortal, she knew she would have killed him. Of course, had he been mortal, he might have taken more care not to let her do such a thing. But she knew she would have killed him if she could have—and felt no remorse at the deed.  
  
Glancing over at the pirate, she saw that he was staring soberly into the fire. He still made her uncomfortable. His stories were still shocking, horrifying. She did not agree with his priorities. He was a pirate, a predator. When he was backed into a corner and the cunning he was famous for and the clowning she had been surprised to discover failed, he would kill without hesitation or compunction.  
  
No. She noted the hand that still brushed the string of souvenirs, the thoughts still flickering behind his eyes. Not without compunction. Only an animal kills and does not remember.  
  
She might question his choice to live by piracy, but she had to acknowledge that he had behaved honourably towards her. That he had saved her life without knowing who she was or expecting any reward, even at considerable risk to himself. In fact, she realized, Jack would have died for that good deed as surely as Will was about to, with far less motivation.  
  
In a small voice she said his name, “Jack?”  
  
He didn’t move or answer her.  
  
She reached out and laid a tentative hand on his arm, the first time she had willingly touched him in all the time they had been together.  
  
“I’m sorry, Jack,” she admitted.  
  
Now he did turn to look at her, eyes curious and mocking, and she pulled her hand away self-consciously.

“I had no right to judge you.” Her eyes dropped to her hands, now clasped tightly in her lap.

  
  
“’S okay, love,” Jack responded raising his eyebrows. The girl had succeeded in surprising him. Her response to his stories hadn’t bothered him—pretty much predictable in fact. But her apology was unexpected. He was much more accustomed to being condemned.  
  
TBC


	9. The Magic of the Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack and Elizabeth and a phosphorescent sea—Mmmmmm. I couldn’t resist sharing with them an experience I actually had. Some angst, some humour, some poetry, some squabbling. Somehow Jack and Elizabeth have to become more physically comfortable with each other. Here's my version how. Ninth in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes plus dragons. Here be the last dragon. The next scene is back to the movie.
> 
> Thanks and another chest of uncursed Aztec gold go to geekmama for beta work on this. Any errors and inconsistencies remain mine.

The last glow of the dying day faded in the west turning the sea from silver gilt to darkest navy silk. A faint cool breeze drifted in off the sea bringing some relief from the sticky heat of the day. Jack added more wood to the fire as the stars lit their lamps in the night sky, mirroring their pale faces in the deep water. Bright Atria glittered impassively in its Triangle. The austere Southern Cross loomed over the horizon with its ominous echoes of blood sacrifice. The moon would not rise for several more hours. Beyond the circle of the fire, the shadows seemed to press against the light, heavy with foreboding.   
  
Elizabeth was the first to break the silence. “Where are they now?” she asked when he sat back down.  
  
Jack didn’t have to ask whom she was thinking of. His mind had been following his ship ever since she had departed. “They’ll have another day’s travel if the winds are fair.”  
  
At least Will was still safe. For the time being. Elizabeth contemplated the bandage on her hand. “They wouldn’t have to kill him, would they?” she asked. That hope had been lurking in the back of her mind throughout the day.  
  
Jack remained quiet for so long that she glanced up fearfully at him. The pirate’s eyes were shadowed. One hand curled around the butt of the pistol in his sash. Finally he sighed, “They wouldn’t have to . . . but they will. I’m sorry, love.”  
  
“Why?” The word seemed torn out of her heart.   
  
“For vengeance. Because his name is William Turner. Because his father crossed Barbossa. Couldn’t keep his mouth shut about what they’d done to me. Bloody honest idiot just like his son.”  
  
“But they didn’t kill me,” she whispered. “And they thought I was Mr. Turner’s daughter.”  
  
“I’m sure you’ve heard of fates worse than death,” Jack’s voice was ironic. Barbossa would never have wasted such a prize. Particularly after ten years of no sensation. They would have killed her eventually, but not before she would have thanked them for it. Will, on the other hand . . . “They’ll have no such use for young William,” he told her, taking a fierce swallow of rum.  
  
Elizabeth shuddered, remembering Barbossa’s leering glance as he’d told her “Waste not!” His terrible intentions had given her time for hope. But Jack, who knew those men well, believed there was no time and no hope for Will. Will who would never have been in danger if it had not been for her. Now she understood what Jack had meant about what futures might show up in the dark. Elizabeth buried her face in her arms and sent up an agonized plea to whomever might be listening. She was too exhausted, too afraid, for eloquence. None of her childhood prayers seemed adequate—just meaningless inanities. Her heart could only repeat over and over again, Please God, save him.  
  
“Elizabeth?” The voice of the pirate startled her. She turned her head to find him watching her with something that resembled concern. “You still alright, love?”  
  
“No,” her reply shook a little to her embarrassment. “No, I’m not.”  
  
“It gets to you like that,” he responded matter-of-factly.   
  
There were moments like these, Elizabeth reflected, when she was reminded that it had not been Captain Jack Sparrow, the legend, who had been marooned on this island ten years ago. And so she told the man who remembered what it was like to sit hopeless on the sand while his friend went to his death, “I was just praying for Will.” Her tone was a little defensive, as if she expected ridicule, but Jack surprised her.  
  
“No shame in that, love,” he said softly. “I imagine if the Aztec gods could curse that gold, perhaps your God could bless young William.”   
  
She gave him a small grateful smile before she dropped her head again. Nor did she pull away this time when he rested a comforting hand on her shoulder.   
  
“I promised to take care of him,” Elizabeth whispered softly to herself.  
  
“What’s that, love?” Jack prompted, although she hadn’t been speaking to him.  
  
The girl looked up at him blindly, as though surprised to find him there. Off in her head somewhere was Miss Swann, Jack recognized. Caught in the undertow of her thoughts. Not a good location on a dark night lost at sea. At least she seemed willing to talk now.   
  
“When Will and I were children,” Elizabeth explained, hugging her bottle of rum to her chest. “I was traveling on the Dauntless to Jamaica when we came across Will’s ship. Barbossa and the Black Pearl had attacked her and blown her powder magazine. They were after Will’s medallion.”  
  
If that wasn’t just like that bloody wasteful bastard, Jack grimaced. Really, the Pearl was lucky Barbossa had managed to get them all cursed. Otherwise he’d have scuttled her long since with sheer lousy strategy. No wonder young William had such a grudge against pirates, if he’d seen that lot of miscreants at work laying waste a ship—not leaving any survivors. The wonder was that the lad had lived at all.  
  
“We found Will floating on a piece of hull, unconscious,” continued Elizabeth. “My father placed him in my care. That’s how this all started.” She looked over at Jack, guilt swallowing her dark eyes. “I took his medallion, because I was afraid they would think he was one of the pirates and would hang him.”   
  
Remembering the bloody-minded Port Royal enthusiasm for hanging pirates, Jack could understand her concern.   
  
Twisting the bandage on her hand until she winced, Elizabeth confessed, “That’s how the pirates found him again. But they found me first. And because I was afraid—afraid to tell them my name and give them leverage against my father—afraid to be kidnapped.” She breathed a tiny bitter laugh at the irony. “I gave my name as Turner.”  
  
Well, that explained one thing that had been puzzling Jack. Certainly Barbossa was a wretched incompetent who shot first and asked questions later, but even he could not have been so dense as to take the wrong child. Now things made much more sense. Thanks to the lass’s lie, Barbossa’d thought he had the right one.   
  
“So they kidnapped me anyway.” Elizabeth looked away. “And then Will came after me. And now, because of me, he’s about to die.” Her voice had a hairline fracture in it there.  
  
If she failed to remember that she was about to die, too—and far more slowly and horribly than Will—Jack wasn’t about to remind her. Impulsively, reckless of the slap potential, he brushed a strand of hair back from her face with the backs of two fingers for a brief instant.   
  
“It’s not your fault, love,” he reassured her. He leaned back, propping himself up on his elbows. “Young Mr. Turner has his downfall grasped firmly in his own two capable hands. Telling Barbossa his name—of all the crackbrained things to do! He should have trusted me when he had the chance.”  
  
This caused Elizabeth to fire up. “Coming from you, that’s a bit much, isn’t it? You could have trusted him enough to explain your plan, couldn’t you?”  
  
Jack supposed she had a point, but trust didn’t come easy to him now. Hadn’t for ten years. People didn’t often disappoint a man who only expected betrayal.  
  
At least the lass was flying her colours again. No surrender for Miss Swann.  
  
Really, if he had to be marooned with a woman, Jack thought, Elizabeth was a good choice. No panicking, no hysterics, no attacks of the vapours. She was suffering, but she was enacting him no tragedies. A bit of temper, a lot of fight and a good dose of sheer pluck in the girl.   
  
“Come on,” he said suddenly, setting his pistol aside and getting to his feet a mite unsteadily. “I want to show you something.” He held out his hand and pulled her up beside him. “Don’t forget the rum.”   
  
Elizabeth followed the pirate down the shore in the dark, not sure why she was clutching a bottle of rum. She also wasn’t sure she wanted a walk, since her walk had become manifestly wobbly after all that rum, but she was sure she didn’t want to be alone. As the fire shrank into the distance, she seemed to be moving through a world of sparkling black, the stars wheeling above, the sea rolling beneath. The world was so huge. She shivered with the loneliness. Why did Jack want to leave the warmth and light of the fire? She could barely see him ahead of her, a slightly darker, swaying piece of night. Suddenly she heard him curse—conch shell. The sound made her snicker a little.   
  
“I should have known,” he groused. “All it takes to make a woman happy is for a man to be miserable.”   
  
When she hit her own shell, she cursed back at him, greatly daring.   
  
“That’s my bonnie lass,” Jack approved. “Consign the bloody things to perdition. We’ll make a pirate of you yet.”   
  
They were surrounded by complete dark night when Jack stopped, a fact she discovered by ramming into the back of him. “Ouch. Watch where you’re going,” he complained.  
  
“I can’t see a thing, Jack Sparrow.”   
  
“That’s good, because I’m going swimming.”   
  
“You’re what?” Elizabeth could hear a brief scuffle of some sort and then Jack handed her something that turned out to be fabric, possibly his shirt.   
  
“Swimming, love. It’s a beautiful night for a swim.”  
  
“You’re raving drunk,” she accused.  
  
“Of course, darling,” he said, depositing his sash on top of the shirt.  
  
“Mr. Sparrow!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “That had better be all you’re taking off!”  
  
“Why, love? You can’t see a thing. And it’s Captain. Captain Sparrow. Or just Jack.”  
  
But he didn’t hand her anything else. She heard the sand creaking under his feet as he walked to the water’s edge, and then she gave a soft gasp.   
  
As Jack stepped into the still sea, his feet lit up with blue-green sparks of light. He waded out to his waist, the shimmering lights clinging to the outline of his body. Then he dove into the water, pale fire flashing along his arms and chest, shivering in fans of light about his legs, glowing in the strands of his long hair. Elizabeth watched amazed at the magical sight.   
  
He broke out of the water, like a merman, luminous streams of water cascading off him, calling to her, “Come on in lass. The water’s fine.” In the flare of greenish fire, his smile was so open and joyous and unshadowed that her breath caught. The beads in his hair chimed as he shook darting drops of light from his face. She had seen dolphins alongside a ship at night glistening with phosphorescence like this, and Jack seemed like nothing so much as another sea creature in his native element.   
  
Leaving Jack’s clothing and the rum he’d made her bring on the beach, Elizabeth walked to the sea’s edge. Bending over, she swirled one hand through the water. The glittering fire traced the path of her fingers. She had no intention of getting her shift wet again, but she kilted up her skirt and waded out into the water, fascinated by the glow that clung to her legs, the trail of light beneath the surface. So beautiful. The liquid flames were so bright that she must be burning. Any moment the pain must start. She thought of Will, somewhere out in that dark night. How could such beauty and such horror be a part of the same world?   
  
Elizabeth didn’t notice what Jack was up to until a shock of water startled a small shriek out of her. “Jack Sparrow!” She spun about, but her protest died in her throat when, with a splash of his arm, he drenched her in a scintillating arc of light.  
  
“Oh!” Elizabeth gasped, raising her hands to catch the silvery sparks. “How wonderful!”  
  
As Jack painted the dark night around her with showers of cold fire, all her thoughts of remaining dry fled. Delighted, Elizabeth embraced the shining water, flinging armfuls of sparkles into the air to mingle with Jack’s until she was no longer sure where the starry heavens ended and the fiery seas began.  
  
The two of them wove in and out of sprays of blue-green embers, laughing and splashing each other. They danced a minuet through snowflake obsidian, trailing clouds of opalescent glory about their legs. Diamonds spangled their hair. Emeralds and star sapphires studded their clothing.   
  
To Elizabeth, Jack was another element moving through her dance like the great slow sweep of the stars above and the ceaseless sigh of the waves against the sand beneath and the rain of liquid flame that flickered around her. She felt utterly alone.   
  
The salt water ran down her face, and who would know if some of it was tears because the sea was so achingly lovely, because she loved Will beyond hope, because death hovered over them all, and because every moment, slipping through her fingers like grains of sand, was so precious.  
  
And she laughed through the tears, because the sea was so jubilantly beautiful, because she loved Will beyond reason, because life thundered vibrant in her veins in time to the pulse of the sea, and because she held every moment cupped in her hands like the dust of diamonds.  
  
Jack dove beneath the surface swimming fiery patterns around her. Elizabeth pirouetted, her arms outflung to the sky. Suddenly she was falling as Jack grabbed her ankles out from under her. Laughing and sputtering she collapsed into the conflagration of light, drowning in a storm of starlight, swimming through streams of stars. Catching her by the hands, Jack pulled her to her feet again, his grin glinting like phosphor.  
  
She splashed him with a wave of bursting sparks. “Wretch!” she accused. He laughed and dived away from her.  
  
When they had grown tired of sporting in the water, Jack and Elizabeth returned to shore. Standing together in the shallows, they looked out over the enchanted sea. The little breeze had stolen up over the point and was gently fanning the water. The crest of each small wave now winked with blue-green fire. Eventually, the magic light faded as the wind picked up, and the sea returned to its black inscrutability.   
  
Elizabeth let out her breath in a small sigh. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for showing me that, Jack.”

“The pleasure was mine, my lady.” He caught her hand and gallantly bowed over it. He expected the lass would object to the familiarity, but some things were irresistible. Sometimes a sneak attack in the dark was the best strategy.  
  
Stunned into inaction for a moment, Elizabeth felt the gull-winged brush of his lips on the backs of her fingers, the tickle of his moustache and little dangling beard braids. It was over before she could pull away.  
  
But Jack did not let go of her hand as they waded ashore. Not the least among his reasons was to forestall that right hook the bonnie lass was so fond of threatening him with. To his surprise, she didn’t try to hit him at all.  
  
To Elizabeth’s slightly rum-laced surprise, she found she didn’t mind. She couldn’t decide whether this was a good thing.  
  
However, the accord between the two of them broke down at the water’s edge.   
  
“Alright, love. Where did you leave my shirt? And more importantly, where did you leave the rum?” Jack demanded.  
  
“On the beach,” Elizabeth replied doubtfully, trying to spot the missing objects in what seemed a uniform darkness.  
  
“On the beach,” Jack’s voice was incredulous. “There’s nothing but beach on this whole bloody island, darling. You’ll have to do better than that.”  
  
That was a silly thing for him to say, she decided. He knew perfectly well what beach she meant. “They’re somewhere around here,” she pointed out with the patience of the sane for the truly mad.   
  
The two of them stared about in the dark.  
  
“Ah ha!” Jack pounced on a faintly lighter object. “Ouch! Bloody driftwood!”  
  
Elizabeth covered her mouth with her hand, but Jack heard that snort.  
  
Grabbing her arm, he pulled the tipsy girl to the sand. “You lost ‘em,” he explained. “You help find ‘em.” When Elizabeth didn’t move, he ordered, “Come, come, love. We need to get back to the fire. It’s too bloody dark here.”   
  
The lost was finally relocated by means of the two of them crawling and feeling about blindly in the sand.   
  
“One thing a good pirate never forgets,” Jack lectured her, “And that’s where the rum is.”  
  
“I can believe that,” Elizabeth sniffed.  
  
Having used his sash to dry himself, Jack tried to get re-clothed in the dark. Elizabeth laughed as he cursed at getting his shirt on backwards.   
  
“The things I do to spare your sensibilities, Miss Swann,” he grumbled.   
  
The trek back to their camp in the dark seemed to take longer. Elizabeth found her walk was growing even more unsteady; she had to grab for Jack’s arm several times to keep her balance. It wasn’t fair that he was so used to being unbalanced that he managed just fine. In fact, Jack was already drinking again as they staggered to the fireside.   
  
Elizabeth was grateful to be back in the light. Too many things lurked in the darkness. Too many thoughts were more difficult to force away when they couldn’t be distracted by sight. Settling down by the fire to dry her shift, she picked up her own neglected bottle and took a swallow of rum hoping to further dull her ability to feel.   
  
As Jack dried himself off in front of the fire, he eyed Elizabeth speculatively. “Now, lass,” he informed her, “You owe me a song.” She looked like she could use a song.  
  
TBC


	10. Playing with Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just how many kinds of fire can Miss Swann play with in one story? Okay! Okay! Here’s the song everyone’s been waiting for. Tenth in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes plus dragons. This scene is back to the movie. Since the deleted scenes version of this episode does not explain where or when Elizabeth gets the idea to burn the rum, I had to make a choice. See what you think.
> 
> Thanks and another chest of uncursed Aztec gold go to geekmama for beta work on this. Any errors and inconsistencies remain mine.

After tossing a couple more sticks on the fire, Jack flopped down on the sand beside Elizabeth. She sat staring into the flames, her arms clasped around her knees, wispy trails of steam drifting off her shift and her hair, the firelight turning them shades of gold. He contemplated the bottle in his hand. Rum and a beautiful woman and a song. It almost made being marooned bearable. Almost. He took a deep drink.  
  
“So,” he turned to the girl. “Let’s have it.”  
  
“The song?”  
  
“Of course the song, love. Though if you have anything else to be offering, I’d be willing to consider it.”  
  
Elizabeth gave a deep, exasperated sigh. “The song is all you’re getting Jack Sparrow.”  
  
He flashed a grin at her. “You can’t blame a man for trying, darling. Have some more rum.”

  
  
Elizabeth thought she would, whatever Jack imagined that might do for his nefarious purposes. She needed a little artificial courage to sing for him.  
  
Several swigs of rum later, she felt fortified enough to try. In a voice as light and soft as that of the young child she had been when she had learnt the song, she sang, “Yo ho, yo ho! A pirate's life for me.”  
  
Elizabeth stopped singing. The pirate’s dark eyes, fixed on her face, were making her uncomfortable.  
  
“Well?” Jack prompted. “There’s got to be more to it than that. I’m sure I remember at least one other line.”  
  
“I’m not used to singing for an audience,” Elizabeth confessed.   
  
“What? A young lady like yourself not an expert in all the accomplishments of drawing room entertainment?” Jack acted shocked.  
  
“But no one pays you any real attention in a drawing room,” she protested.  
  
“I can do my best to ignore you,” Jack offered. “But you’re easy on the eyes, love, and I’d really rather not.”  
  
“Mr. Sparrow!” Really the man’s sunflower compliments were putting her to the blush.

  
  
Jack rolled his eyes and raised an admonitory finger.   
  
Before he could say it, Elizabeth interrupted, “I know, I know. It’s Captain. Captain Sparrow.”  
  
“I knew you couldn’t be as slow as you seemed, love,” the captain smirked. “Now go on. Go on. Don’t be shy.” He took another drink and flapped his hand at her. “You’ve been running around all day in your underclothes, not that I’m complaining, darling, and now you’re balking at singing a little song? Where’s the logic in that?”  
  
He dodged the swat he knew perfectly well he deserved.

  
  
But the playful banter had at least relaxed Elizabeth enough that she could continue.  
“We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot.  
Drink up me hearties yo ho!  
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot. . . .”  
  
Images of her home shattered by cannon fire, of men with armloads of her family’s possessions, of splintering shop windows and fleeing people, of blood running in the street gutters flickered behind her eyes. She recalled fists smashing into her face, ropes chafing her wrists raw, loneliness and fear chilling her heart, strange dangerous men with inscrutable motives laying hands on her. Her voice trailed off. She looked down, biting her lip.

  
  
Jack reached over and tilted her chin up, seeing the memory in her eyes. “It’s different when it’s not a game any more, isn’t it love?”

  
  
She nodded, not trusting her voice.   
  
“Tell you what,” Jack suggested. “Let’s just pretend none of this has happened. You’re back in England and . . . how old were you when you learnt this song?”  
  
“Six,” Elizabeth admitted. “I heard it from some traveling players in the market. . . .”

  
  
“Wait, wait, wait!” Jack waved Elizabeth to silence. “Your father let you sing this song when you were six years old?”  
  
A small giggle escaped Elizabeth. She really had the most endearing giggle when she was drunk, Jack decided. Tinged with mischief.   
  
“He didn’t find out until it was too late.”  
  
Jack raised his eyebrows. “No wonder the man has gray hair, love.”  
  
“That’s a wig, Jack,” she remonstrated.  
  
“Oh and you’re telling me he doesn’t have gray hair under that wig?” He lifted one of his own highly ornamental locks.  
  
Elizabeth conceded that he had a point.   
  
“Well now.” Jack flourished his arms like a conductor. “On with the song, Miss Swann. Buck up, me hearty! I can promise you, you won’t give "me" gray hair. If you’re six years old, that would make me—hmmm—well never mind that. I’ll just be six years old too.”

  
  
Looking into the pirate’s eager eyes, Elizabeth could almost see the six-year-old Jack had been superimposed over the man he had become. Their day’s activities had proved that he’d buried that child less deeply than any other adult she knew.  
  
Pretend. She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, trying to recapture the feeling she’d had as a little girl, listening to the merry music that sparkled through the gray day.  
  
Her words came out rather tentatively at first.   
“We extort, we pilfer, we filch and sack.  
Drink up me hearties yo ho!  
Maraud and embezzle and even hijack. . .”  
  
“That’s it, love,” Jack’s voice was full of sly laughter. “Close your eyes and think of England.”  
  
Her eyes flew open. Oh! That man wanted slapping so badly! Then her sense of humour, or the rum, got the better of her and she doubled over, laughing.  
  
The laughter loosened something inside of her that had been too painfully tight for this song. Her voice grew stronger as she continued.  
“We kindle and char and inflame and ignite.  
Drink up me hearties yo ho!  
We burn up the city, we're really a fright. . .”  
  
She would not think about the flames over Port Royal. None of it had happened yet, they were pretending.

  
  
Jack watched, appreciating the really rather poignant sight of Elizabeth, whose childhood had been peeling from her so fast he could almost see the layers drop away, reenacting her childhood song for him.  
  
“We're rascals, and scoundrels, and villains, and knaves,” she sang, gaining enthusiasm as she remembered how she used to sing this song. “Drink up me hearties yo ho!”  
  
When she had finished, Jack, who was certainly a rascal and a scoundrel, and at times was even a villain and a knave, exclaimed, “That is a wonderful song!” ready to try it himself. He chased a swallow of rum down with another one.   
  
“It’s even better if you dance,” Elizabeth told him.  
  
Jack bounced to his feet, wobbling a bit. “I love to dance!” he informed her, holding out his free hand and hauling her up.

  
  
Nothing but the wind and the waves and the soughing palms witnessed the two castaways singing in the dark. Singing because it would do no good to weep. Dancing and drinking rum to outrace anguished thought. In the circle of light cast by the fire to hold back the night and the future and fear, Elizabeth Swan and Jack Sparrow played her childhood game, cavorting in opposite directions about the fire, and caroling at the top of their lungs, “We're devils and black sheep and really bad eggs. Drink up me hearties yo ho!” Unashamed, the governor’s daughter kilted up her skirt, kicked up her heels and danced with a pirate.   
  
“Yo ho, yo ho!” they chorused.  
  
“Ouch,” interrupted Jack, discovering a conch shell the hard way. Then he joined back in, “A pirate's life for me!”  
  
As Jack staggered around the fire, arms out flung flourishing his bottle of rum, he whooped delightedly, “I love this song!”   
  
Catching Elizabeth’s arm, he whirled her about, the two of them laughing hilariously. They swung apart, and Jack tilted into an intoxicated spin shouting, “Really bad eggs!” But his balance was not equal to the task anymore. Eyes going unfocused, he gave a soft “Ooof” and toppled to the sand with an inelegant burp. Rocking back to a sitting position, he grabbed Elizabeth’s arm and pulled the giggling girl down beside him.  
  
Eagerly he informed her, “When I get the "Pearl" back, I’m gonna teach it to the whole crew, and we’ll sing it all the time!” He had had enough rum that there was no doubt he would get her back. Lovely, lovely rum.  
  
Eyes glowing, tousled hair catching light from the fire, the rum-mellowed Elizabeth enthusiastically entered into his plans. Leaning towards him she gushed, “And you’ll be positively the most fearsome pirates in the Spanish Main!”   
  
Widening his eyes and waving his spread fingers in her face, Jack waxed even more excited, “Not just the Spanish Main, love. The entire ocean! The entire world!” He gestured expansively.   
  
Lost out in the middle of that ocean, on a sandy beach, watched over only by the indifferent stars and the dark tossing shapes of palms, Captain Sparrow painted pictures for her of his dreams.   
  
“Wherever we want to go, we’ll go,” he told Elizabeth. “That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs.” Jack’s eyes glowed with small flames. His hands traced ships in the air before him. Elizabeth half expected to see them sail off to the stars limned with firelight.   
  
“But what a ship is,” he paused, looking out over the restless breathing waves, holding out a hand to the sea as if to caress a ship that was not there, his voice low and passionate, "what the "Black Pearl" really is…is freedom.”

  
  
Elizabeth marveled at the change in Jack. His expressive eyes which she had seen furious and dangerous, sober and empty, madcap and laughing, but always hard like a steel blade, were soft and liquid with longing and loss, almost with love, searching the dark night for an even darker ship that never came. The fire outlined the pirate with light as the phosphorescence had done, and she thought how like the sea that he loved this man was. As if he had spent so much time in it, he had become a part of it—capricious, heart-breakingly beautiful, unpredictable and deadly. A surface of ever-changing light over fathoms of deep, dark mystery. And above all, free as no one else she knew was free, responding only to the force of the wind and the pull of the waves. His body was engraved with the record of the price he had paid for that freedom. For the first time she thought she might understand a little of why Jack was so desperate to win back the Black Pearl, why Barbossa would consider it the ultimate torment to maroon this man and take his ship.   
  
The rum having dulled her sense of propriety (never one of her strong points anyway) and her sense of self-preservation, she gave in to the impulse to lean comfortingly against Jack’s shoulder, her head fitting snugly under his jaw so that his breath stirred her hair. The sea was too big, the night too dark, the future too uncertain for a man or a woman to be so horribly lonely.   
  
“Jack,” she murmured, “it must be really terrible for you to be trapped on this island.”

  
  
Jack stiffened, shifting like a sail that has caught a new wind. “Oh, yes,” he breathed, slipping an arm around her shoulders. What an unexpected gift! What a lovely girl she was. Her hair glowed golden in the firelight like treasure. Her slender body pressed entrancingly against his side. “But the company is infinitely better than last time,” he assured her. So good, not to be alone.

  
  
At first Elizabeth felt only the warmth and security of his strength, but then his words, the race of his heartbeat registered. His low insinuating voice brushed her forehead as he gazed down at her. “And the scenery has definitely improved.”  
  
Elizabeth looked up into Jack’s dark face, so close to her own. For the second time, she was in the arms of the notorious pirate captain. Again his smouldering eyes held hers, his voice murmured seductively in her ear. Again the rancid scent of rum and sweat and the sea, the heat of his body assaulted her senses. Again his eyes devoured her; his teeth gleamed with gold in his disturbing smile. But when he had taken her hostage, while she had been outraged, she had known the lechery was a joke, a pleasant flirtation for a man who always flirted, an airy nothing intended to insult her father and infuriate the commodore. And while she had been angry, she had not been afraid.   
  
This time, however, was different. His arm encircling her shoulder. The brush of his rope-calloused fingers on her arm. The need in his rum-darkened eyes. In consternation, she twisted her head to see his grimy hand in its strange wrappings holding her. The faceted emerald in his silver ring winked at her in the flickering light. This time Jack wasn’t joking. Not playing for his audience the role of mad bad pirate. Here, stranded alone on this tiny island, the only audience he played for, kept at bay by the glow of the leaping flames, was the dark angel Death, whispering in the night behind their heads of thirst and hunger, of a single shot in a single pistol lying on the sand at the edge of the light. She could see the shadow of it in his eyes and wondered what he saw in hers. And so she did not slap him away, nor did she tell him no. And while she was not angry, she was very afraid.  
  
Her voice holding a note of panic, Elizabeth fell back on a parody of formality, trying to distract the pirate.   
  
“Mr. Sparrow!” she exclaimed, pulling out of his embrace.   
  
“Mmmm?” he looked at her in intoxicated confusion, letting his hand drift across her back.  
  
“I’m not entirely sure that I’ve had enough rum to allow that kind of talk,” she told him in her best society imitation. But oh, she had had far too much rum. Too much rum to run away as fast as she should be running away.  
  
Jack’s hand slipped off her shoulder and hovered in the air before her. Reflected fires burnt in his dark eyes as he pointed at her significantly. His smile held nothing comforting.   
  
“I know exactly what you mean, love.” His voice held the suffocating heat of a summer Caribbean night.  
  
If he did, that was more than she knew herself. Like a small wild creature cornered by a predator, Elizabeth sat frozen in the sand. Without taking his eyes from hers, the pirate slowly lifted both hands to his face. Stroking his fingers down his moustache, he twisted the ends and curled them up. Then his hand dropped to her arm, brushing the tips of his fingers from her elbow to her shoulder in a way that sent a frisson up her spine. She had to draw his attention away—to give herself time to think. What was the right thing to do? What did she really want?  
  
In desperation, Elizabeth raised her bottle of rum. “To freedom!” she saluted.  
  
Jack brushed her hair from her shoulder, his hand resting on the nape of her neck, his rough thumb caressing the curve of her jaw. He held her gaze as he lazily lifted the dark bottle, touching it to hers with a festive clang.   
  
“To the Black Pearl.” His voice was graveled velvet; his eyes promised things she was afraid to imagine.   
  
Tilting her bottle against her lips, Elizabeth took a small sip, hoping Jack would follow suit. He tipped back his head, draining the bottle in long gulps, but his hand remained nestled in her hair, fingers feathering her skin, sending chills down her neck. In apprehension, Elizabeth looked away from him. She was running out of delays. She didn’t know why she hadn’t tried to escape him, why, in spite of her own resolutions, she needed the touch of another human being. The rum in her head was making it hard to think, harder to refuse any solace offered.   
  
Steeling herself, she waited, staring out to sea, for the decision to be taken out of her hands. Then she felt Jack’s hand go slack, trailing down her back as, at last, he slumped to the sand.  
  
Almost unbelieving, Elizabeth stared at the unconscious pirate captain. Reprieved. Finally he had passed out, although now she was alone with the menacing dark beyond the firelight. She was not sure what might have happened had she had enough rum. Had he not had too much. She was not sure she wanted to find out. But what was left to them? Captain Jack Sparrow had proved not to be a miracle worker, tamer of sea turtles, fiendish escape artist. He was an ordinary human being, like herself. And the bones of ordinary human beings had been picked gleaming white by sea birds on islands like this one before.   
  
She ran a daring finger over the curve of Jack’s cheek bone, imagining the dark skin rotted away, the gleam of skull, and she shuddered. He slept on so peacefully, arms out flung, looking innocent, which he certainly was not, and vulnerable, which she now knew he was. When he had stood beside her in the wash of the tide, watching his ship disappear, she had seen the armour fall. As he had described what his ship meant to him, almost she had seen the wound, so like her own. Looking at him now, haunted eyes closed, muscles relaxed, she realized how like a halyard under too much strain he had been, nearly ready to snap. If the "Pearl" was his freedom, as he had drunkenly tried to explain to her, perhaps, in her absence, rum was his substitute freedom. She looked a little tipsily at the bottle in her hand, firelight glowing in its depths. Drink up me hearties yo ho.  
  
Taking another swig of rum, she hiccoughed loudly. Not such a perfectly lovely woman now, Commodore, she grimaced, imagining what that stiff proper man would say about his ideal woman, dressed only in a grimy shift, spending the night beside a dead drunk pirate, guzzling rum. The lowliest slattern could scarcely better the infamy!   
  
Dead drunk.

Dead.

Men died of alcohol poisoning.

Suddenly she was terrified of being alone with a dead man on the island and she frantically bent over Jack. With relief, she felt his breath on the back of her hand, the steady beat of his heart against her scarred palm. He was only asleep. Surely she would die first. She couldn’t bear to die alone. In morbid curiosity she crawled over to the pistol, picked it up and stared into its sinister eye—one shot for Barbossa, Jack had sworn. One shot left for a marooned man to end his misery swiftly. One shot between the two of them.

Who would pull the trigger?   
  
The fire popped suddenly, like a pistol or an explosion. She thought of fire—of the lambent flames licking at driftwood, of the dehydrating sun scorching white sand, of the cold blaze of phosphor searing a still moonless bay, of the flint-struck spray of sparks that would ignite black powder, of the intoxicating burn of amber rum in her brain, of the look in Jack’s eyes before he had passed out.

Fire.  
  
She was so tired, she realized. Her head felt detached from her body. Her eyes suddenly refused to stay open. Shivering, Elizabeth moved closer to the fire, but she was afraid of the snapping embers. Surely Jack was out for the night she rationalized. So she moved back towards the slumbering pirate. She lay down beside him in the sand, not touching, but close enough that the heat radiating off him warmed her a little. A wistful memory of Estrella tucking her under a warm coverlet stirred, and she felt a pang of homesickness. She hoped her father and Estrella were safe. She hoped she would see them again. Then sleep swallowed her in blessed oblivion.  
  
The cold woke her in the pre-dawn darkness. Jack hadn’t moved at all, she discovered. Her head felt as though someone were hammering on it. Her tongue felt thick and dry. But the only thing to drink at the moment was more rum. The fire had died down to coals and the night was closing in on her—she had to keep the thing in the dark away. However, when she tried to get up to add more wood, her legs didn’t seem quite to belong to her. She felt triumphant and light-headed when she finally succeeded. The flames rose up, throwing small glittering stars into the sky and setting ghost fires alight on the waves.

Their own little lighthouse. Don’t hit the island in the dark.   
  
Elizabeth giggled foolishly, but then an idea caught.

A beacon!

Commodore Norrington must have the entire Port Royal fleet out searching for her. Her father would insist on it. They would not see this small fire except by veriest accident, but if she could make a big enough fire . . .

Rum and explosions. She had gallons of explosives.   
  
The trick would be to put her plan into effect without waking the rum-sozzled pirate. Just how drunk was he? He’d proven his ability to consume phenomenal quantities of rum without incapacitating himself. She couldn’t have him coming to and realizing what she was up to. Even as she was stumbling to the hidden stash, she knew Jack Sparrow would kill her. He would use Barbossa’s shot on her. Elizabeth cast a quick glance at the slumbering pirate as she lugged a barrel past him to the stand of palm trees on the point of the island. She would have to hurry.  
  
TBC


	11. Not All Chains Are Iron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which rum is burned, homicide is contemplated, and the British navy is horrified. Jack waking up hungover—what’s not to love? The last conch shell makes a cameo appearance. Eleventh in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes plus dragons. Here be the last movie scene. 
> 
> Thanks and another chest of uncursed Aztec gold go to geekmama for beta work on this. Any errors and inconsistencies remain mine.

Jack came slowly back to consciousness feeling vaguely pleased in spite of what he could tell was a first rate hangover. He remembered a few things about the night before—namely being pickled in rum and having a lovely girl in his arms—always a good thing. He didn’t remember anything else happening. But today was another day, with more rum.  
  
Gradually his befuddled senses began to report in to his even more somnolent brain that the sound of fire was a great deal louder than even his splitting headache could warrant and that the smoke was unusually thick. Against his better judgment, he opened his eyes.

Bad idea.

Light assaulted his abused head. A muffled explosion confused him further. If there was a battle going on, why was he sleeping and why couldn’t he feel the sea move? He turned his head towards the sound.

Ouch! That hurt!

Palm trees. Those were definitely palm trees, which meant he was on land, but something was very wrong with them or with his eyes. He wasn’t prepared to say which. They looked for all the world like they were on fire.   
  
Unexplained motion at the base of the trees drew his eyes. He squinted, trying to focus. A sand-coloured figure was scurrying about suspiciously. The figure resolved itself into the aforementioned beautiful girl and a barrel of rum.

Mmmm, rum!

Elizabeth—that was her name. A lot more fun with a little rum in her than with a quart of sea water. He attempted to sit up. Elizabeth tossed the barrel onto a pile of wood and other barrels. Jack was indignant. That was no way to treat good rum.   
  
A violent explosion woke him up fully to the horror of the situation. Flaming fragments shot into the air lighting more trees on fire. Smoke billowed high in the sky. Elizabeth crouched down, sheltering her head with her arms until the debris had settled.   
  
Jack stumbled to his feet, eyes wide with shock. His body was scarcely functioning, let alone his brain. He staggered, arms waving disjointedly, towards the madwoman.   
  
“No!” he shouted. “Not good!”

The magic quicksilver of his words failed him.

“Stop! Not good!”   
  
She threw another barrel into the inferno. Everything was burning. Everything necessary for any kind of survival.   
  
“What are you doing?” he cried, as Elizabeth stalked by him towards the beach. “You burned all the food! The shade! The rum!”  
  
With perfect unconcern, she agreed, “Yes, the rum is gone.”  
  
“Why is the rum gone?” Jack begged, following her, hands outstretched in frustration.  
  
Elizabeth turned on him fiercely. “One, because it is a vile drink that turns even the most respectable men into complete scoundrels.” Her dark eyes snapped with reflected fire.

Jack winced back from her vehemence.

“Two, that signal is over a thousand feet high. The entire Royal Navy is out looking for me! Do you really think that there is even the slightest chance that they won’t see it?”  
  
“But why is the rum gone?” Jack tried to pry the words out of his mouth with desperate finger-tips. A vile drink? Liquid gold! Nectar of the gods! Elixir of life! All that stood between them and the nightmare of thirst. All that stood between him and the nightmare of reality.

  
  
Ignoring the raving pirate, Elizabeth planted herself firmly in the sand of the beach, dusted off her hands, wrapped her arms around her knees, and propped her chin in one palm. With a confidence she hoped he believed, she told him, “Just wait, Captain Sparrow. You give it one hour, maybe two, keep a weather eye open and then you will see white sails on that horizon.” She gestured expansively at the smooth cobalt sea.

The empty sea.

Eyes on the horizon, she prayed she was right.

  
  
Behind her, Jack was fraying into a thousand enraged pieces. This little bit of a female had plotted against him, Captain Jack Sparrow. Had plied him with rum and sweet talk until he had passed out and then had stolen his rum. Blown it all up. His hands clenched in fury, as though they grasped her slender, treacherous, aristocratic neck. His entire body was shaking. Fumbling wildly, he drew his pistol, breath hissing through gritted teeth. For a moment the barrel wavered in the air behind her windblown golden brown hair.   
  
No! He gasped with the effort of reining himself back under control. This shot was for the man who had stolen his ship, not the girl who had stolen his rum. He needed to leave. Now. Before he did something he would regret. Stuffing the pistol back in his sash, Jack stormed off unsteadily down the beach.

  
  
Back on the shore by the flaming palms, Elizabeth let out the breath she had been holding and buried her head in her arms. She had survived. The mad, rum-besotted pirate had not killed her. She would not have the honour of being another souvenir in his hair. Now, she could look forward to a slow and agonizing death unless a ship appeared. She concentrated on willing one onto the ocean in front of her.  
  
* * * * *   
  
Jack stomped down the beach, cursing Elizabeth, Barbossa, Will, the island, Elizabeth, and the conch shells, punctuating his curses with frantic hand gestures. He was rapidly coming to the next point of the island. Behind him, on the other side of the smooth curve of the bay, the bloody little rum-burner was invisible on the white sand.   
  
Fuming, he mimicked Elizabeth in a falsetto voice, “Must’ve been terrible for you to be trapped here, Jack. Must’ve been terrible for you.” He spun around precariously and hollered back up the beach, “Well it bloody is now!”   
  
The sight of the tower of smoke from his precious burning rum did not improve his mood. Furious, he resumed his rampage along the shore. Rounding the point, he froze, one hand raised in an imprecation cut off mid-syllable. Out beyond the breakers of the barrier reef, in the deep water, the Dauntless rode at anchor, her white sails brushed with the morning sun, hanging in their gear ready to be sheeted home. Already a quarter of the way to the island, a boatload of marines was rowing briskly.  
  
The wind luffed out of Jack’s anger. Grimacing, he predicted, “There’ll be no living with her after this.”  
  
* * * * *   
  
The pirate was returning. Elizabeth studiously ignored his approach. He didn’t seem as enraged as he had been when he'd rushed off. But she didn’t want to talk to him.  
  
“Elizabeth.”  
  
She glanced up. Jack no longer looked about to commit murder. In fact she couldn’t read the strange expression on his face. With a puzzled frown, she asked, “What is it?”  
  


Jack steeled himself to admit Elizabeth had been right. Damn the girl.

“You’ll want to be packing your trunks, love,” he grinned ruefully.

Startled speculation narrowed her eyes.

“The little boat from the Dauntless is just off shore around that little point.” He waved in its direction.  
  
Her reaction surprised him. Bouncing jubilantly to her feet, she caught his hands and whirled him madly around.   
  
“Ooof!” said Jack. “Easy there, love. Me head’s not too well attached this morning.”  
  
Elizabeth paused, undaunted. “Oh, Jack! Now we can rescue Will!” she cried ecstatically. Then a little doubt crept into her voice. “There’s still time, isn’t there?”  
  
“Yes, lass,” he agreed. “We might get there in time.”

He didn’t know if that were true for Will or not. They had been a whole day on this island, and Barbossa and his crew were over-eager. A lot would depend on what good heart the Black Pearl was in. But if he were to have another chance at the Pearl, he needed to get to Isla de Muerta. And to get the Dauntless to take him there, he needed the little rum-burner on his side. Her price was and always had been Will.  
  
Elizabeth let out a delighted laugh and continued capering about with the bemused pirate in dizzying circles. Jack laughed with her for his own reasons. The bonnie lass, even sober, was all living flame, eyes sparkling, face flushed, constantly in motion, free and unconstrained. And he had thought it took rum to slip her out of her chains. Will was a lucky man—if he lived.  
  
So, the sight that met the eyes of Commodore Norrington and his crew as they rowed around the point was of Elizabeth, a fine British woman, clad only in a soot- and salt-stained underdress, kicking up her skirts with bare legs, and dancing shamelessly with that worst of pirates, Jack Sparrow.  
  
“Not that I’m complaining, love,” Jack nodded his head in the direction of the longboat, “but I feel obliged to point out that we’ve got company.”  
  
Elizabeth dropped his hands and flew to the water’s edge. “Commodore!” she called, perfectly unselfconscious. “I’m so glad you’re here!”   
  
The smile on her face, reflected Jack, would have thawed anything but the frost in that boatload of starched British prigs. As their disapproval registered with the girl, he could almost see her chains snapping back into place, her flame snuffing out.   
  
Joining her, he gestured dismissively at the little boat full of fools. “That’s why I’m a pirate, darling.”   
  
Elizabeth looked at him, the fire still smouldering in her eyes, her eyebrow lifted in question.   
  
He jerked his chin at that stick Norrington and company. “The only chains they can put on me, love,” he held out his wrists side by side in demonstration, “are made of iron.”  
  
He saw comprehension on her face. “You’re a smart man, Jack.”  
  
* * * * *  
  
And so their little interlude was over.  
  
Elizabeth would go back to her world of teas and gowns and morning callers—and censorious stares if the men in the Dauntless’s boat were any example. And Jack knew he would soon be bargaining for his very life. Commodore Norrington had “gallows” written all over his face whenever he looked at Jack.   
  
He was surprised to realize that he would miss this godforsaken spit of land this time around. The old painful memories had been coloured over and eased with new ones of a sparkling battle of wits with a lovely girl. She had been a worthy opponent.  
  
Impulsively, he bent down and dug around in the sand.

  
  
Elizabeth watched Jack in puzzlement. What could he possibly be up to this time? She’d long since ceased to put limits to the odd things the man might do.  
  
“Ah ha!” Jack exclaimed in triumph, straightening up holding a conch shell.  
  
Now why, she wondered, would he want one of those pesky things?

  
  
Turning the ridged conical shell about in his hands, Jack contemplated its prickly spiral points, its smooth rose interior. Perfect.  
  
“What is that for?” Elizabeth asked.  
  
Jack turned to her and brushed his fingers along her cheek that wore the mark of Barbossa’s blow. “Memories, love. I’m going to have this carved into a souvenir.” He smiled at her. “Some things a man prefers not to forget.”  
  
She stared at him wonderingly, then grinned back at him. “Not one of these?” Elizabeth reached up to touch the beads on his forehead.  
  
“No, alas,” he gave an exaggerated sigh. “Though it’s not my fault you missed your chance, love.”  
  
Her hand drifted down to the strand where he memorialized those who had died by his hand. “Nor these,” she said softly.  
  
“Well, it was a near thing,” he grimaced. “Don’t you ever be burning me rum again, lass.”  
  
The Dauntless’s boat was being drawn up in the shallows now. Jack looked over Elizabeth’s shoulder and met Commodore Norrington’s furious gaze. He smirked at the man. _You may have her now, mate. But this place and the memory of this last day are ours. And you’ll always wonder._  
  
Jack turned his eyes back to Elizabeth. She glanced down at the shell he was holding, then her dark eyes lifted to his.  
  
“For absent friends?” she asked holding out her hand.  
  
He closed his hand over the shell, feeling its points biting into his palm. Hidden menace and beauty of form. A prickly surface and a glowing heart. Echoing with the breath of the sea.  
  
“For absent friends,” he agreed taking her offered hand.

  
  
The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story picks up again in another of my fics I'll be posting soon, Aboard the Dauntless


End file.
